ANN COULTER ON TIME... COVER STORY CONTROVERSY

AOL News (yes, i'm linking to AOL News... there is a first for everything) has a interesting overview on the Ann Coulter cover story in Time, the article, and responses from the "blogosphere" (also polls and pics too). Personally I sometimes get annoyed listening to her. Sometimes she has good points, but sometimes she says extreme things that make me cringe. Also she is rude and overbearing in most of the debates I've seen her in. She doesn't let the other person finish and raises her voice over the other person.

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter is so controversial, even a story about her can touch off fierce debate. And this week's TIME cover story has. She doesn't like the cover photo. Some bloggers are blasting it as a puff piece. And the author is vigorously defending it. Use the guide below to dig into this story.

Ms. Right
By John Cloud, TIME

Ann Coulter and I were well into a bottle of white Bordeaux—and I believe she was chewing her fourth piece of Nicorette—when it happened. From what little I knew of her—mainly her propensity for declamations such as "liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole"—I thought it impossible for Coulter to blush. Many of her fans would later tell me it was her fearlessness they admired, her fully unburdened sense of outrage against liberalism, against anyone left of Joseph McCarthy (whom Coulter flattered in her best-selling book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism).

But in person, Coulter is more likely to offer jokes than fury. For instance, you might ask her to name her historical antecedents in the conservative movement, and she'll burst forth, "I'm Attila the Hun," and then break into gales of laughter so forceful you smell the Nicorette. "Genghis Khan!" So finally, I asked that she be serious. I wanted to see the rancor that allegedly is her sole contribution to public discourse (that and being a "lying liar," in Al Franken's estimation, as well as a "telebimbo" [Salon] and a "skank," according to a blog kept by Vanity Fair's James Wolcott). Why, I asked, did she enjoy attacking others and being attacked?

She composed herself and offered a very Ann Coulter answer. "They're terrible people, liberals. They believe—this can really summarize it all—these are people who believe," she said, now raising her voice, "you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all. You don't want such people to like you!" (full article)