July 08, 2003
POLITICS: Coulter and Dowd
Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal draws a parallel I've often drawn myself, calling Ann Coulter "the Maureen Dowd of the conservatives."
Are Ann Coulter's views presented in a tongue-in-cheek fashion?
That may be the effect Dowd is aiming at, but when you keep dumping the same bucket of chum every few days, eventually it stops being a defense that you're just kidding. Dowd makes clear what she thinks, and what she expects her readers to think.
Conservative columnists like Goldberg, Steyn and Lileks use humor to advance arguments, but that doesn't shield them from scrutiny. If you just want to do humor and stay out of politics, don't do political humor on the op-ed page of the nation's most prestigious newspaper.