Isn’t it a tad ironic for the woman who hired Amanda Marcotte to be complaining about Ann Coulter’s level of discourse?

Of course, there’s a difference: Ann Coulter is to politics what pro wrestling is to sports, and intentionally acts the part of a clown. (It wasn’t always so: at her best as an attorney for the Center for Individual Rights in the 1990s, Coulter successfully litigated against a whites-only scholarship in Alabama on behalf of an African-American, Jessie Thompkins, who was ineligible for the scholarship because of his race.) In contrast, Marcotte was explicitly chosen by the Edwards campaign to speak for it and the level of political discourse it wanted to produce.

And then there’s John Edwards himself, and his level of discourse in the courtroom, where attorneys are ostensibly officers of the court with an obligation to be truthful. Of course, truth and fairness wouldn’t have made John Edwards millions.

Update: my cousin Garance Franke-Ruta has a different take at the Guardian website that takes two Coulter attacks on Edwards out of context, and I’m not sure where “look like a cross between a Robert Palmer back-up dancer and an Edward Gorey drawing” fits on the Edwardsian scale of political discourse.

Filed under: Alabama, John Edwards, politics