Time for Ann

This week's Time features Ann Coulter as the cover story. Next to Rush Limbaugh, Coulter upsets the left more than anyone alive. Her columns are light-hearted, mocking the left with over-the-top suggestions.

The reason she bugs the left so much is that they take her seriously. When she says that we should go ahead and nuke North Korea right now, just to warn the rest of the world, she does not really expect this to happen. I will go so far as to speculate that she doesn't really wish that the entire staff of the New York Times was dead. But she does want to shake things up.

The funny thing is that the let lost its sense of humor. They think it's funny when activists send Bush pretzels, hoping that he will choke or when they sell "Kill Bill" take-off "Kill Bush" T-shirts. Twenty years ago a friend was passing out buttons reading "Lobotomize Republicans, it's not just a good idea, it's the law." How is that any different from Coulter's style of comment?

Over on MSNBC, arch-liberal Eric Alterman is outraged. One favorable story about a conservative and he gives up on them forever.

Time’s cover story/whitewash of Ann Coulter, will make it impossible for serious people to accept what the magazine reports at face-value ever again. It is as if Time had contracted a journalistic venereal disease from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and is now seeking to lower itself to their level in pursuit of their ideologically-obsessed audiences.

Personally, I think that carrying Alterman's blog makes it harder to accept MSNBC at face-value, but that's me.

Media Matters is another site that worked itself into a froth over the Time story, but that's their normal state.

This ties nicely into my last couple of posts - the left is so convinced of its own legitimacy that it wants to deny the right a forum. The right does well on talk-radio so the left first subsidizes its own version, the failing Air America, then it starts talking about reviving the Fairness Doctrine. Plus there are the attacks on conservatives - mainly pies but who knows when this will escalate.

Until Noam Chomsky or Ward Churchill is hit with a pie, this represents a desire for censorship of the right. Good thing these guys don't have enough power to pull it off.