Your comment came and went too quickly. I’d be interested in more development.

The piece she wrote for USA Today was terrible. To say it was written by a 13 year old would be unfair to 13 year olds.

However, I checked out her site today and read some of her other stuff. Those other articles managed to stick to a point, were coherently written, and were actually funny.

I have no doubt that Ms. Coulter created this situation to get more press and more TV time.

Bad UI?

Maybe Sir William of Washington will pick her up and she will be hosting a show on MSNBC soon. She’d be great at beating down enemy Linux users. I could here it now, “all Democrats are worthless Linux hacks.” Ann interviews Bill live from his palace in Washington. Bill says, “hey I’ll pay you in MSFT stock and you will be a billionaire on paper.” Bill can buy USA Today and bring Ann in as the Editor in Chief and rename it MSUSA.

Here are a couple of great quotes from Ms. Coutler. It sounds like facts are the LAST thing she cares about:

“It’s not as much fun to argue a point as it is to mock people for things outside their control.”

“Bad, vindictive humor with little substance to back it up is Ann Coulter.”

http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/canon_fodder/0633_firing_ann_coulter_real_story_.html

You can defend Ms. Coulter all you want. But it’s pretty apparent to me that she has absolutely NO credibility.

Ann falls for Mike and she then goes a bit left and he goes a bit right and they produce a little bouncing centrist baby boy they name Jorge, after John Kerry and George Bush. Now they all live happily ever after in central Chicago.

How about Annie Get Your Gun. Ann walks into a Washington news room with a cigar in that pretty little mouth packing a Glock 40 Cal. autopistol and justs gets the lead a flying. After shooting the place up, she says, “that’ll show’em I mean business, now who’s the editor?”

Go ahead, make my day!

But you missed the central issue, it wasn’t so much “no editing”, as it was incompentent editing. When you have an Editor, you want someone with a background in said field. Say someone with zero background in things technical,attempted to edit a JCD column, it would be a butcher hack-job. I see this as USA Today flying blind. They should have known what they were getting into and they should have known her writing style. A bad Editor can ruin many a good writer. Ann, it looks like, felt USA Today was ruining her style. And knowing how USA Today is blandly fluff mass-marketed edited, it is very easy to side with Ann. It’s her name, it’s her product. And even if she doesn’t want to be edited, then take it or leave it.

Why the righteous indignation? She is who she is, least she tramples not in the hazy fact zones like Moore does. But in terms of basic market share, Ann wins bigtime. I, personally, seriously disagree with the Wired 1995 Libertarian Bubble-Making crowd, of which Ann is somewhat a part, but at the same time I disagree strongly with the Leftist blogger shrills, that strike me as irrational and anti-intellectual. The world is complex, things don’t neatly fit into nice-little-pretty-packages. Life is absurd.

Side Note: I am not related, but given that she has millions and a nice Miami Beach place and visits the Conservative Wing of Richie Palm Beach from time to time (freq. seen supposedly at 264, Cafe L’Europe and Maison Janeiro, tho been reports of Chuck and Harolds and Taboo), I would very very much like to be related. She’s got a way cool last name tho.

The most despicable thing this crowd does — as part of their lambasting of traditional Conservatives, who usually have been lifelong Republicans — is the label they hang on them as RINO’s. Republicans In Name Only. This was started by the semi-igneous money columnist, Larry Kudlow. Here’s one of his stellar quotes:

“The stunning Microsoft decision to return more than $75 billion in cash to shareholders over the next four years is a smashing endorsement of the importance of President Bush’s pro-growth tax cuts.” Gee, Bill. Another Microsoft interpreter to contend with. One who has no perception of cause-and-effect relationships.

As someone whose personal politics are Progressive [I know you know what that means, John], I mostly only respect Conservatives because [1] there is a traditional reliance on fact-based decision-making — [2] the Libertarian tradition of free speech and independence from corporate controllers is as strong as any anarchist’s.

Most of my kin in the Great White North still belong to the oldest continuous political party up there, the Progressive Conservatives. No contradiction, at all. You respect the environment. You keep your nose out of other peoples’ business. You pay your bills.