Is Coulter sincere?

New York Magazine has a story this week on Steven Colbert of The Colbert Report

…with Coulter, there's always been a sturdy suspicion that she is playing a character (like Colbert) and amping up the obnoxious rhetoric for maximum effect (like Colbert). When I mention the comparison to Colbert, though, he seems surprised, even unnerved. "I don't really think about her much," he says. "She's a self-generating bogeyman. She's like someone who wants attention for having been bad." Given that he's hosted right-wing true believers like Joe Scarborough before, and has often said he'd love to have Bill O'Reilly on the show, would he ever invite Coulter as a guest? "My sense is that she's playing a character," he says. "I don't need another character. There's one character on my show, and that's me."

That raises the question : Does Coulter truly believe the outrageous things she says?

It's clear that she is respected by, and valuable to, the conservative media. She is regularly invited on shows like The O'Reilly Factor to give her opinion on everything from national security to evolutionary science despite having no training or expertise in these areas. Yet, sometimes the things she says are so inappropriate, so ridiculous, that one can't help but wonder if she is only pulling a Howard Stern and saying them for shock value. Is it all just a put-on to draw attention to her latest book and lure readers to her weekly column.?

Is it sincere, or is it shtick? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

October 15th, 2006 Posted by Eric | no comments