Is This Love in My Heart for Ann Coulter?

Today Sharon Cobb highlights Ann Coulter's column, which is brilliant, incisive, witty, and completely right. Every word of it. Yes, I know. I did, in fact, say that Vanderbilt inviting her to come and speak was akin to asking Matt Hale over to dinner. I did call her "Hate-Filled Barbie" (which I still think is funny as shit and mostly accurate). And yet, here I am liberal blogging genius*, agreeing with her. Is it the drugs? Is Kat's prediction finally coming true--did I wake up this morning more conservative than I could have ever feared? What's going on? To answer your question, let's go back to the summer I lived with the Libertarian and the soccer team. Living with the soccer team was easy--"Hey, B., are you up?/Home from work?/Not yet passed out? We're going to get some beer. Should we bring you some?" Living with the Libertarian was nice, because I could sit in at his computer, listen to Hole, play Civilization II, and drink said beer, as long as I was willing to put up with him sitting on his bed with his one-hitter telling me all of the ways I was wrong about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and how one day I'd surely wise up. So, I've known him since I was twenty. And for the Clinton administration, the dynamic of our friendship was him bitching about me selling myself short by, in part, not embracing the genius of Libertarianism, and bitching about how cruel all my friends he was trying to sleep with were. And I would smoke his cigars and drink his strange lime concoctions and disagree. It was good fun. Like the best professional wrestling matches, two equally matched opponents with mutual admiration, each trying to outwit the other. Things dramatically changed under Bush. I kind of knew it on the phone. He would call to say "I'm getting married and, oh, by the way, this George Bush dude is a moron." and I would say, "Wow, congratulations, and, yes, you're right" and he would say, "did you just agree with me?" and I would say, "oh, look at how late it's getting. I have to go." But the change was really apparent when I sat in his dining room watching his kid play on the floor, struggling to remember enough Russian to speak to his wife, and trying to argue with him about politics, just like the old days. Except, we just didn't have that much to argue about. Bush had clearly warped the political geography in such a way that the two of us, obviously on opposite sides of every argument, found ourselves standing on a landscape that used to be flat and round like a pancake, but now was twisted and bent like a fortune cookie, with me still in the same spot, him still in the same spot, but our two points brought closely together by circumstance. And so, in the end, I'm not surprised to find that Bush would continue to act like a giant black hole, strong enough to warp space, time, and politics so that we could reach a point where I was finding myself in agreement with Ann Coulter. But what really bothers me about it is this nagging question I have in the back of my head--what if she's always been funny and I've just missed it because I have always thought she was an insane, hate-filled shrew? Ah, well, I'm not going to worry about it that much. A stopped clock is right twice a day. I suppose Hate-Filled Barbie is going to occasionally be right as well. *Obviously, America, I am not actually a genius. I just play one on the internet.