Is Ann Coulter back?

Yes she is and no she's not. I usually avoid talking about Ann Coulter. I find her attempts outrage liberals and charge up movement conservatives boring. Her act has gotten old and she hasn't done anything to freshen it up. I'm even starting to feel sorry for her.

Her basic shtick is to behave like a four year old who just discovered that grown ups will gasp and pay attention when they say certain words. Whenever there are guests in the house you can count on them run into the middle of the room and shout "shit!" Coulter has a book to sell, so she's going to be shouting vile things for the next few months just to get attention.

She's even digging up some oldies-but-goodies that have nothing to do with her current book (women shouldn't have the vote) but that she knows will always get her some attention. That's a sign of how tired her act is. Her latest book is an attempt to pander to the recent rise in xenophobia among some parts of the right. That should be a goldmine of material for someone like her but she can't be bothered to do the work of writing more than a handful of new one-liners.

The old act isn't working as well as it used to. A couple of my liberal friends passed on her latest efforts with almost no commentary. Today, their outrage attention has been focused on McKinny, TX and the sexist douchebaggery of Sir Tim Hunt. The rest of their attention has been focused on finding common cause with our conservative friends in mourning Sir Christopher Lee.

I think Coulter's slide into irrelevance began in 2008. She had a good run for almost ten years as the pin-up girl of the far right. She wasn't the most beautiful, but she was quicker with an outrageous line than any of her competitors. Then along came Sarah Palin. She was younger and more stylish, just as snarkey, and she had a new set one-liners ready to rile up the audience and outrage the other side. She was nowhere near as intelligent, but she was better at working a live crowd.

Now Sarah's moment in the sun seems to be passing. She's getting a bit long in the tooth and even influential conservatives have noticed that her speeches are nothing more than proven applause lines strung together in random order. The audience is looking for a new pin-up girl who can generate the appropriate energy on both the right and left. My money is on Meagan Kelly (I think Rupert Murdoch's money is also on her). She's young, she's conventionally beautiful, she's quick witted, and i think she's by far the most intelligent of the three. She's a little more subtle, which means she's not as good of a rabblerouser, but that's offset by making her seem reasonable by too many on the left. It takes us a few minutes to process what she said.

So, where does this leave Ann? At this point, she isn't even last year's fad, she's the year before last's fad. She's an 80's band playing a reunion tour in a high school auditorium. She's hauled out the little black dress one more time--which looks more than a little embarrassing for a woman her age--and is rolling out tired old lines before an aging friendly audience. The proper response to her act is no longer excitement or outrage. On both sides, it should be a kind of embarrassed compassion. In other words, pity.