A consummately silly point.

If someone says “Barry Bonds is slow” and their companion replies “as if you’re fast!” — they’ll probably reply “I never said I was.”

Cowardice is different from speed. When almost anyone says “You’re a coward,” it’s assumed that they implicitly mean “and I’m not.”

If someone reads a war story and says: “What a coward this soldier is — he didn’t even throw himself on the grenade to save his pals” his companion might well say: “Hmmmm. I note you’re not even over there fighting the war.” And that would be a valid point, because the speaker’s assumed message was: “I would have done it differently.”

(Note that this is different from the “chickenhawk “argument. Most war-supporters don’t go around questioning the courage of soldiers. If they did, the chickenhawk argument would be valid.)

“You’re a coward” carries the implicit message “unlike me.” “You’re a coward, unlike Ann Coulter” carries the implicit message “and unlike me.”

If made by one blogger to another blogger, or by one talk show host to another, etc., I agree. But when a random calls a talk show host to bitch and whine, I’m more inclined to interpret that as a “why can’t you be more like my hero so-and-so” dig than “why can’t you be more like me.” The same is true, albeit to a lesser degree, of random commenters. They don’t expect you to be like them, they expect you to be like their heros. Thus, when you turn around and say “oh yeah, if I’m such a coward, why are you anonymous,” it smacks of Barry Bonds being told “my grandmother can run faster than that,” and having him respond “Oh yeah? I’ll race her any day! Then we’ll see who’s really faster!”

Coulter is also risking what every prominent person risks, a nut with a gun and a grudge. People as deliberately provocative as she is are in fact displaying considerable personal courage.

Mmmm, okay. I guess by your logic there’s nobody more courageous than Ted Rall. That’s certainly how he sees it.

He lost his cartoon’s spot in the Washington Post due to the Terror Widows cartoon. And he gets regular death threats.

If you want to say Ted Rall has courage as well, to be consistent, then I guess you have something of a point. But including Ted Rall shows how silly the point is, because he’s a twit. I’m just not sure how admirable it is when someone’s “courageous” acts are virtually always stupid as well. As I said above, there is indeed a difference between courage and stupidity, and I think we’re conflating the two here.

Ultimately, as I said above in the thread, I’d prefer to save the word “courage” for people who really display it, and do great things with it. Like our soldiers.

Patterico, you claim Coulter is not risking anything because her employers are conservatives and only liberals are complaining about her. This is a pretty unconvincing claim considering the amount of complaining you have been doing about her. Or are you a secret liberal?

You got me!

Yeah, Ann Coulter sure displays a lot of courage, risking a few posts from Patterico, who gets 2000-3000 visitors a day. He might even convince one person to change their mind about her! (Actually, as we have seen, that’s not even true.) Amazing, that kind of courage.

To make an unrelated point, Xrlq, just how obsessed are you with Ann Coulter? I note that, unlike Instapundit, you have posted several items about her in recent days. It indicates an unhealthy obsession on your part, as compared to, say, Instapundit.

(If anyone doesn’t understand the point I just made, they’ll soon be helping me make it.)

Personally, I think Barry Bonds is a slow runner, a lousy fielder, and a so-so thrower. I think Ted Rall draws poorly, and that every song ever recorded by Poison, Alice in Chains or Jane’s Addiction sucks ass. Am I precluded from doing so because I have even less talent in these areas than they do? Or am I allowed to say these things, anonymously even, where the implicit contrast I’m drawing is to other baseball players, cartoonists and rock stars, and not to myself?

It doesn’t matter to me why Coulter says what she says, what matters to me is when she is just plain wrong, or deliberately insulting, and refuses to correct her error when said error is pointed out to her. The woman has all the intellectual courage of Dan Rather.

To quote Harlan Ellison, “You have the right to your opinion, you don’t have the right to be wrong.”

Coulter is also risking what every prominent person risks, a nut with a gun and a grudge. People as deliberately provocative as she is are in fact displaying considerable personal courage.

Usually people lose columns for dishonesty (Doug Bandow) or accusations of dishonesty (Michael Fumento), and not for extremism. If they say something too hot in a column, they’ll just kill that column.

But I notice that when she made her”towelhead” comment, she changed it to “jihad monkey” for her syndicated column when it ran on Townhall.com. So I htink she is a little concerned about getting too marginalized or alienating too many publishers. She’ll say things in a book she won’t say in a column. She’s walking the line here, getting just enough controversy to keep her fans engorged and tingling, but not enough to get kicked out of syndication.

She may have miscalculated.