I happened to catch a couple minutes of CBS's Early Show over my morning coffee, and after an interview with someone from People Magazine celebrating Paris Hilton's release from jail, the news was read.

It was a short segment on Elizabeth Edwards' confrontation of Ann Coulter on live TV that caught my attention. For some reason, CBS felt compelled to explain to viewers that Coulter's typically obnoxious remarks (this time it wasn't about Edwards being a "faggot," but about how Coulter wishes "he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot") were offered "somewhat jokingly."

This little bit of editorializing had the strange effect of making Elizabeth Edwards' remarks, not Coulter's, seem the unreasonable ones. Like, ah, come on, Elizabeth! She was just pulling your leg! Lighten up, you old stick in the mud!

Coulter's continued success requires the media's collusion. Say what you will about the so-called liberal press, if someone on the Left said they wished for George W. Bush or John McCain or even Mitt Romney what Coulter wished for John Edwards, they would be skewered (and, at the same time, broadcasting the remark would be further proof of the liberal media conspiracy).*

The fact is there is no one on the Left comparable to Coulter, or Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly or Bay Buchanan.

At least part of their appeal is their irreverence towards the political process. The Left has its irreverent types, too, to be sure—John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, to name a couple. You might throw Michael Moore in, as a political gadfly. But the difference is stark.

Open Irreverence is also the appeal of a politician like Bush, who has unapologetically flouted and mocked the system from day one, or one like Romney, who my money's still on for the GOP nomination, and whose unflinching belief in his personal destiny gives him powers of Nietzschean proportions. Romney's run is more existential than political, and therein lies his appeal. He's turning out to be positively Teflonic, at any rate, Reaganesque in his brushing off of critics with a chuckle, rather than (like that other famous flip-flopper) a whine.

This irreverence has many faces, but always a populist appeal. We like our politicians to take the piss. It's a regular guy kinda thing to do.

But those pundits on the Right have taken it to new depths. I mean, Coulter's like a petulant four year old. But her Tourettes-like taunts appeal, I think, precisely because she accurately reflects the Id of the Republican's "populist" base (a base that is being mocked, you can be sure, by the party's elites).

For the record, some of Elizabeth Edwards' comments:

In the South, when somebody does something that displeases us, we like to ask them politely to stop doing it. I'd like to ask Ann Coulter too. If she'd like to debate on issues, on positions — we certainly disagree with nearly everything she said on your show today — but it's quite another matter for these personal attacks.

It did not start with [yesterday]. You had a column a couple years ago which made fun of the moment of Charlie Dean's death and suggested that my husband had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said,'ask me about my dead son.' This is not legitimate political dialogue. It debases political dialogue. It draws people away from the process. We can't have a debate about the issues if you're using this type of language.

Some might say that the Edwardses get what they get when they bring their personal lives into the political arena, but this is nonsense. Whether the death of their son or Elizabeth Edwards' cancer should be a part of the candidate's personal narrative really isn't the question. We live in an age when if they were silent about these things it would seem strange, almost inhuman.

Coulter's response was to claim her First Amendment rights were being violated by Elizabeth Edwards, and she bravely proclaimed "The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking. No."

But it is really Chris Matthews and ABC News and The CBS Early Show and, of course, Fox, which give Coulter, who has nothing very useful to say—she's sort of the Bad Britney of pundits—a platform and legitimacy for her shtick. And this is probably because she never fails to blurt something we pretend is provocative. But she is not exactly shouting "fire!" in the theater. More like "shit!" in the sandbox.

To implicitly excuse Coulter's remarks as made in jest is nothing more than an acknowledgment of debt to her and her ilk by news organizations with too much time to fill and not enough hustle to go out and find news to fill it.
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*6/28/07—Coulter claims to have simply been responding in her remarks about Edwards to a remark Bill Maher made about Dick Cheney. "Bill Maher was not joking and saying he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack," Coulter said on GMA. "So I've learned my lesson. If I'm gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot." But did Maher actually say what Coulter claims? The Transcript from Maher's show says no.