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For sake of argument, she's right
© St. Petersburg Times WASHINGTON -- The first time someone described Ann Coulter as a "right-wing telebimbo," she was stunned and maybe a little hurt. But now she wears it as a badge of honor. "As Mao said, "It's a good thing to be attacked by your enemy,' " she told me Friday in one of the many interviews she has been doing to promote her new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. As Coulter proved on NBC's Today show early last week, she will do or say just about anything to promote herself and her book -- even calling Katie Couric "the Eva Braun of liberalism." She says the only interview she has spurned lately was with radio shock jock Howard Stern. Coulter is one of several attractive women lawyers on the far right and far left who have capitalized on cable television's need for talking heads of both genders and made careers for themselves as television pundits. The list includes conservatives Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, a pollster; Laura Ingraham, a radio talk show host; and the late author Barbara Olson, as well as liberal Susan Estridge, who ran Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign. Glib, outrageous and exceedingly contentious -- these are the trademarks of the women pundits who are savagely referred to as telebimbos or "fembots." With short skirts and plunging necklines, they seem to be trying to provoke a response with both argument and sexual tension. A native of New Canaan, Conn., with a law degree from the University of Michigan, Coulter broke into television in 1996 as one of the first regular guests on MSNBC. At the time, she was working on the Senate Judiciary Committee for then Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan. Soon she was working full time as a pundit with a syndicated column and hefty lineup of regular television gigs. As she tells it, fame was her destiny. "It was pure fate," she says. "I was just bumbling along practicing law. I never sought this for myself. . . . God just decided, we've got enough lawyers, you are supposed to be on TV." God may have had a little help from Bill Clinton. Like many of the women of her ilk, Coulter emerged on a wave of Clinton hatred. She worked behind the scenes to assist Paula Jones in her legal harassment suit against Clinton and talked it up on television. Her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, was a bestselling anti-Clinton screed. Some say the heyday of Coulter-style women pundits passed with the end of the Clinton presidency. But Coulter has zeroed in on another topic that gets her just as riled up: liberals. She admits they may be a dying breed, but her harangue against them works perfectly on cable television, where the formula is to have a liberal and a conservative who insult each other. Coulter's strongest argument is that liberals such as George Stephanopoulos and Couric are hired to present unbiased news on television, while conservatives like herself are relegated to the position of offering opinion. She also objects that liberals portray conservatives as dummies or Nazis. So how does she prove her point? By calling Couric the Eva Braun of liberalism. On CNN's Crossfire last week, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, a handsome young man who comes as close as you can get to being the male counterpart of the fembots, took Coulter to task for using the very tactic against liberals that she condemns them for. But Coulter knows better. "When conservatives use colorful language," she says, "it tends to be true."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today Sara Fritz Gary Shelton Howard Troxler |
