Coulter/Palin, Two Harpies in the Same Corner

As soon as J. McCain, in a cynical and ill-fated attempt to add some pizzazz to his flagging 2008 Presidential campaign, dropped Sarah Palin onto the American consciousness, I wondered what Anne Coulter thought.

To the extent that a woman's outward appearance matters -- which, whether we like it or not -- amounts to a lot, until Palin's arrival Coulter, a slim, leggy blond with a vacant and somewhat silly expression that belies her seriously evil aspect, had no real competition among the right wing harpies, and she had to be jealous. This had to be especially true when, as the author of several best-selling book-length diatribes against liberals, she could have had no trouble convincing herself that she was by far Palin's intellectual superior. But Coulter must've realized and accepted the fact that in this male-dominated world, a woman's looks far outweigh her smarts in the general appreciation of her, and in that respect Palin, even with her spectacles and her dark hair and the five children that she had borne, still far outshone Coulter, who, to the best of my knowledge so far has produced no children at all. For one thing, Palin's appearance has a warmth to it that is lacking in Coulter, whose face is like a chunk of ice with a grin carelessly smeared on it, and Palin's being three years younger is not enough explanation.

Coulter must also have chafed mightily that she herself had not been considered for the VP nominee role, if a woman was needed, in view of the long service she had wrought to the conservative propaganda cause, years long before Palin shook the Alaskan snow out of her hair.

Yet, if Coulter ever protested Palin's primacy in 2008 and in the four years since, I never heard of it. This High Priestess of Hatred, right up there in lethality with the Limbaugh guy, had been much more humble than I would have thought possible in such a woman. Imagine my surprise and even shock, then, when on the Huffington Post I saw an item a few days ago about “Palin vs. Coulter.” It seems that,without specifically calling out Palin, Coulter had not only come out with a statement in which she attacked the cult of personality with which she thinks Palin has drastically infected the Republican Party and the conservative cause, but also Coulter actually complimented the Democrats by saying that, unlike the Republicans, they had avoided stepping into such a trap. I thought that saying anything good whatsoever about Obama's side was a big no-no among each and every one of her stripe on that end of the spectrum. And at this point when the Republican candidates have been fanning hatred of B. Obama up to the superheated point? Incredible!

Coulter is especially scornful of the fact that Palin is pushing for a brokered Republican convention, which will give her a chance to come into her own as the eventual nominee, with the favorite, Romney, having avoided the fate of all his competitors during the preceding primary season, finally having experienced his own fatal comeuppance. So Palin would have grabbed the prize after all, after having shrewdly avoided all the hassle and humiliations of the primaries, and that possibility must've been too much too galling for Coulter to bear, in her last analysis.

If carried onward, this arm's length confrontation between these two iron-bottomed right wing females promises to be one of the most interesting sideshows of this political season, and it is as likely to be subtle as it is to be blatant. Palin will try to ignore Coulter, until she can't any longer.

Meanwhile can it be that Coulter, after a career of stomping and stamping on the liberal gullet, is finally considering making that most dangerous of moves in American traffic and turning more to the left? Or is she trying on the all-embracing mantle of that distinguished conservative of old, Bill Buckley, who in his later days was not above suggesting that drugs should be legalized? Either way, straightening her wheel would be a tectonic shift that I had hoped to see some day in Palin instead, because I obviously take much more delight in her (Coulter's longtime flourishing in the same bag with Mr. Bog has totally ruined her in my mind), though not at all because of Palin's physical aspects. Still no chance should be missed to display for the second time that truly remarkable photoshopped or impersonated likeness of unknown origin of Palin, because after bearing five children, the Bering Strait, and Todd What's-his-name, in real life she can't possibly be this, this.... Well, you say it.