You'll just have to read this shit

A DEFENSE OF ANN COULTER.
Weenie Roast
by Elspeth Reeve
Only at TNR Online | Post date 08.15.06

For six months, I was the only liberal on Line Three. It was in an assembly line in a small town in a dark red state, and I worked the second shift with mandatory overtime, which meant the only humans I ever saw were my fellow button-pushers and sticker-application specialists. The choice between soul-searching monotony and political shouting matches was not a hard one to make, especially after September 11. And, to avoid being trampled by the majority, I had to play dirty, to use the kinds of lines that kill political careers: about coat hangers, say, or about how Jesus was a liberal. It always helped to have a few seconds of stunned silence to let my point sink in.

Of course, when it became too obvious that I was winning the argument, my darling male coworkers would simply change the subject to my ass. I daydreamed about discussing dead French guys with super-smart people when I got to college, where I could wear horn-rimmed glasses and never have to keep my backside pressed against the inventory. What a letdown it was to discover that college students were not all that different from my friends on Line Three. Neither, by the way, is Washington, where always-waiting-to-talk types need to be bitch slapped out of their robotic-pundit routines, and where political conversations often pivot back to appearances.

That is why I love Ann Coulter. Coulter shocks and offends, but underneath her offensiveness is a grain of truth that people cope with by critiquing her hair. Americans like comfort: comfort food, comfort shoes, comfort pundits to reinforce everything we already believe. Ann Coulter is not comfort. I love that she pisses people off. I love her outsized confidence, rare in females who've gone through puberty, which means she doesn't turn into a pile of stuttering mush when an interview turns to her body. I love the way her face flickers devilishly for just a second when an interviewer wraps his own noose--the joy tinged with a bit of sadness, as if to say, Oh what fun this is, but do you have to make it so easy?

Frank, you know, you keep running bullshit like this, people are gonna realize you're the editor, not Zengerle the fabulist or Chiat the weathervane, but you.

People will remember the stuff you ran. It will not be a happy memory