I think Coulter would ring Dowd's bell for sure.
I see them as playing different games so a "debate" would be a big waste of time. Coulter is a bigoted ideologue, the worst sort of ideologue, who can not bring herself to think of the other side as having human status. She's not trying to be funny; she actually considers people like me subhuman. At first I thought she was just another person, a bit like Laura Ingraham, who used that kind of talk as a way to get media attention. But it wasn't in the bones. No longer.
Dowd, while certainly and obviously having political convictions, is not an ideologue. She's trying to be funny with many of her columns. When you are on the other side, as I found myself with her Clinton columns, it's a wit with a sword. No doubt. But you can imagine her chuckling behind the computer keyboard, both at herself and at the lines but not really at the object.
To offer another illustration, she wrote a beautiful column about her friend, Michael Kelley, when he died in Iraq.
Dowd is not my kind of op ed person. I thought she was well down the list of choices when the Times was looking for a replacement for her predecessor, name escapes me as I'm typing, oh, yes, Anna Quinlan. Now she was an op ed columnist. |
