Back in June, during the last kerfuffle, I offered this brief assessment of Ann Coulter:

Quoting myself quoting myself:

Back on March 2 (on the ancien regime blog--and before the current kerfuffle), I offered this brief assessment of Ann Coulter:

Quoting Myself: "I think she is often uproariously funny and sometimes very insightful, but I also think she can be crude and mean-spirited. Although I give her credit for outwitting Katie Couric (in all seriousness, that was a bravura performance), I think Coulter is something akin to our Maureen Dowd (funny, attractive, possessing a rapier wit but lacking compassion and judgment). Ann Coulter, for me, will forever be the woman who judged John Roberts unfit for the Supreme Court and attempted to reinvent Joe McCarthy as a great American hero."


You get the point: we have been here before.

Ann Coulter is serially inappropriate and often completely erroneous. Last summer, detractors presented evidence against her charging plagiarism.

Having said that, I will refrain from the feeding frenzy fueled by conservative self-righteous indignation.

Why?

1. Our vigilance in pursuit of this hysterical exercise proves correct her assertion that we are all becoming zealots in persecuting semantic transgressions. Joe Biden? George Allen? We are a community of glass-house residents; we ought to discourage stone-chunking mobs.

2. There are plenty of reasons to disown Ann Coulter. I did it long ago. But this posse, formed as a result of a singularly offensive remark, is disproportionate and cowardly. Evaluate Ann Coulter on her body of work. Dissociate yourself from her brand of politics and provocation. Bravo. But let us renounce this increasingly prevalent practice of purging veteran public figures from the body politic because of a momentary albeit egregious lapse in public etiquette.

This Open Letter to CPAC Sponsors and Organizers Regarding Ann Coulter doesn't pass the "ick" test for me. Gentleman, you will have to ride without me on this necktie party.