"LIBERALS THROW PUNCHES LIKE GIRLS"

Wacko Ann Coulter gets off on infuriating her audiences. That's why she likes to speak in LA, New York, college campuses. She loves it when outraged audiences jump up and scream. At one event, "they would call me 'fascist' or 'racist' or whatever. It was great." Now finding respectability at cocktail parties, she admits not so long ago she found it slightly embarrassing to be right wing. "You would go to a cocktail party and it would take 45 minutes to determine the person you were talking to was a right winger. We were like homosexuals with a scarf in the back pocket." Now she's out as a conservative and not the least bit afraid of people she infuriates for a living. "Nooo," she says, "Liberals throw punches like girls."

Phew. Well, other than delineating all that's offensive in her comments--all of it, actually--it's the last line that intrigues me, because for the most part, she's right about that, sexism aside.

As the pundits are now unanimously noting, it took Dean to get the other candidates to get to the point. While Dean's own campaign may be floundering (and the pundits are doing their best to make this happen by repeating it constantly), nonetheless his moral outrage, expressed angrily at times, has resononated with many of us. He, with no guile, speaks truth to power.

Now the other contendas are beginning to express themselves with that outrage. But they need more.

The net is filled with commentaries on why liberals and progessives won't or can't fight on the same turf as the extreme right. It's all true, and good for us. Because--we're right, and they're wrong--not just in substance, but in political demeanor.

But these are no ordinary times. Let's take the gloves off. We don't have to surrender the moral high ground, which we've always had by definition* if not action, but we do have to throw stronger punches. Dean taught us that.



*A modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in
moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification
for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith