Goldberg and Guthrie

There is quite the hullabaloo in the blogosphere about the Ann Coulter Time magazine cover. I haven't been able to find the actual article online, so I've refrained from commenting (demonstrating the strong journalistic intergrity and ethics Goldberg and Guthrie readers have come to expect).

But I read an interesting quote from the article today, as excerpted at The Daily Howler:

When I spoke with her friend Miguel Estrada, an attorney and onetime White House nominee for a judgeship...he said Coulter's appeal 15 years ago, when they met, was "the same as it is today. She was lively and funny and engaging and boisterous and outrageous and a little bit of a polemicist ... Most of the time, people miss her humor and satire and take her way too literally."

This shocks me. I actually thought that smart, reasonable, mainstream conservatives - if they exist - try to distance themselves from Ann Coulter - a woman who has repeatedly called for the conversion of all Muslims to Christianity and who, for the record, is an open and upapologetic bigot. Miguel Estrada was nominated by the Bush White House to be an appellate judge - that should qualify him for smart, mainstream conservative status. This is the equivalent of a Clinton nominee defending the substance of Ward Churchill's remarks.

I've often said to my conservative brethren that pointing out the errors in Ann Coulter's work is just fun - she says very stupid things but they are in no way representative of the way most Republicans actually think. I've had reservations about that when, for example, she speaks at prominent conservative gatherings. To see an important and, I had thought before today, intelligent conservative figure defending her just drives home the point at how far the conservative movement (and, to be fair, large portions of the American public) has morphed into something that is both very scary and very stupid.