Professionally Foul

I haven't had a lot of time to actually view Ann Coulter during her book tour, but it seems like a lot of people wonder why TV programs like The Today Show or Whatever the Hell Tucker Carlson's Show Is Called put her on. Actually, there's not much to get there. Ann Coulter is a woman who makes her living by calculating just how horrible her colleagues have been, then taking it one step further. She's a right wing carnival geek act who hopes to appall her audience with the sight of her own degraded filthiness. Right wingers watch her because they sometimes love to view the nether regions of their own souls. Those leftists who do pay attention to her do so, I guess, because she's a distillation of everything the left finds repugnant in the right. And if you're willing to be an object of disgust, revulsion, and a certain kind of morbid curiosity, cable TV news has a camera waiting for you.

Actually, there have been times that I've watched more than a few seconds of Ann Coulter. (Yes, some of those times involved losing the remote, but stick with me here.) What I wait for on those occasions is the moment when she takes off the blonde wig and reveals that she is in fact Andy Kaufman, and that Coulter's entire act has been Kaufman's twenty year metajoke on news organizations, Regnery publishing, Andy Kaufman fans, and the world at large. I'll bet that's why Bill Maher brings Coulter on his show. If Andy Kaufman is going to step out of his Ann Coulter disguise, it's going to happen on Maher's set. You can come out now, Andy. We're wise to you.