So many of us love to hate Andrew Sullivan, but occasionally he hits the nail on the head. Here's his take on Ann Coulter's latest outrage:
But the problem with Coulter is that she is a form of camp, is she not? The minute you take her seriously, you lose grip on her reality. She's not a social or political commentator. She's a drag queen impersonating a fascist. I don't even begin to believe she actually believes this stuff. It's post-modern performance-art. I think of Coulter in that sense as more at home on the pomo-left than the Christianist right (which is why the joke, ultimately, is on the Republicans who like her). Devoid of sincerity, detached from any value but performance, juggling rhetoric for its own sake, she is Stanley Fish's model student. Half the time, I tend to think that a Hannity or O'Reilly or Malkin actually believes their own rhetoric. With Coulter, I don't believe it for a second. And so her vileness cannot be taken seriously. She is worse than vile. She is just empty.
I had never really thought of Coulter this way, but somehow reading this made me feel...better. Better in the sense of unclenching my teeth a little bit. I'm not sure I buy it, entirely (not sure that Sully does, either), but it lowered the blood pressure a little, for what it's worth, and put a different spin on her ugliness that made me feel a little less polluted from even thinking about it.