Ann Coulter - tall cool chic

Jerry Pournelle links to an article from the Guardian in England
about an interview with Ann Coulter. (Every week Dr. Pournelle
has a correspondent in England that sends an email chock full
of good links.) Even though the intervierwer doesn't like her,
Ann Coulter comes across as smart and funny and it's still worth a read.

...After we've ordered our drinks, I ask Coulter whether she thinks she owes her success to a conservative following, or to liberals' need for a bogeyman.

'Oh, that's a good question,' she chuckles. 'One of my favourite liberal friends has laughed about how it's just like clockwork: they attack you, and all it does is give you publicity, and they can't help themselves - they just keep attacking. Liberals hate me because I understand them better than they understand themselves. They pretend not to get the joke.'

As the first plane went into the World Trade Centre, Coulter was in a cab on her way to LaGuardia airport. She was listening to the radio she always carried with her, before i-Pods were invented. 'At first I thought it was some shock jock joke,' she says now, 'but then everyone was pulling the same joke'. When the second plane hit, she leaned forward and told the cab driver the news. He didn't react. He was a Muslim. Coulter was instantly alarmed.

After spending all day in a bar in Queens (the bridges were shut, the subway had stopped, she couldn't get back into Manhattan) she wrote her infamous 9/11 column on her laptop, and hasn't changed her view since. Was that her position before, I wonder?

'No, I never cared about the Muslims,' she says of the people she more frequently refers to as 'ragheads'. 'It seemed like a morass - that's why so many popular jokes are based on peace in the Middle East. I thought, it's a morass, other people are dealing with it, I'll write about Clinton.'...

I tend to agree with most of what she says in her books and columns, we
as a country are too politically correct, and too willing to put up with nutso
conspiracy theories. Being a widow of a victim of 911 doesn't entitle you
to tar the president with conspiracy theories that bush knew, etc and not
have anyone such as Coulter fire back. Ann Coulter was more impolite than
I would be in public, but that is tactics not strategy. I mostly agree with
the strategy of calling a traitor a traitor or in my case a coonass a coonass.

Too much talking around problems so that we never offend any group
leads us to our current situation where it is illegal to profile based on race
sex or handicap before people get on airplanes. The reality of what
we are trying to stop is planes being turned into cruise missiles, so I'd feel
better searching all the big and tall men who might be dangerous with a
box cutter. If Granny wants to try and hijack a plane with a box cutter,
bring it on, I can take her.

Another shocking episode from Ann Coulter's career came from a column
written on september 11th:

The night the Twin Towers fell she wrote a now famous column suggesting that 'We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity'.

Once again, tactics not strategy, I wouldn't have converted anyone
to christianity...In fact at the time, I agreed most with Jerry Pournelle
when he wrote what we should do on september 11:

For a start: we know the places where they rejoiced and danced in the streets in celebration of the falling of the towers. Those streets and all their buildings should become monuments: not one stone stands upon another. Level the rubble so that a troop of cavalry could ride across where they stood and not one horse stumble. Then sow salt on those grounds. They will be left as monuments, visible from the air, visible from space: monuments to dead Americans.

"But we did not do it! We only -- we only rejoiced that you would see what it is like."

"You chose the wrong friends. Next time make better friends. You may take what you can carry. You have five minutes, then the bulldozers will flatten this area. Get out of here. And of course if anyone is stupid enough to fire on us, the Marines are eager. Aren't you, Sergeant?"

"Sir. Yes, sir."