It's wrong for the righties to take credit for killing liberal secular humanism.

The identity police on the left planned and carried out that murder back in the eighties and nineties when liberalism and humanism were attacked and debunked as oppressive figments of white male heterosexist privilege. Now we are just living out the inevitable consequences of that ideological program.

I honestly don't know how we're ever going to get back from where we are now.

Every time I see her speak I see that bobbing adams apple and become even more certain that it is a man in drag.

So, Ann Coulter repeatedly referred in public discourse to Arabic peoples as "ragheads"? And she continued to do so even after someone sympathetic to her position urged her not to?

I would suggest that her statement is sufficient to prove that Coulter has nothing to contribute to public discourse. I'd suggest that media that strive to respectability, should only give Coulter as much space as they give to someone on the street corner raving about how he or she has received radio signals from aliens that Earth is about to be invaded.

Great article, really nicely written. But I'm wondering if you were serious when you said all candidates promise to double the number of engineers. Very cold war --- except no mention of scientists? Maybe they plan the doubling by forcing all the former scientists to do something more useful and less controversial than looking for evidence and facts.

Ann Coulter is as "bland and obvious" as Bobcat Goldthwait? Michael, Bobcat may not be your cup of tea comedically, but trying to sound like Dennis Miller by likening him to that fascist dullard is a low - and ignorant - blow indeed. Are you confusing him with deceased ranter Sam Kinison? Bob has actually been making great work of late, like the genius, little-seen "Windy City Heat". I haven't seen his new bestiality comedy "Stay" (which premiered at Sundance), but even if it's the cinematic atrocity of the century it could never come close to what the bland and obvious Ann says on a daily basis.

Why bother increasing the number of engineers?

It seems lately that Corporate America is dictating policy to the "conservatives" in charge - surely one of them got the message that Corproate America is outsourcing engineering to Bangalore?

It's been obvious to me for some time that Coulter is playing too one-dimensional a game to actually be a "conservative".

I mean, she drives away some members of her own party who are even fractionally left of "full right", but that's not her mission. Her mission is clearly to ensure that the "Reagan Democrats" never, ever, come back to the Republican Party.

Although I am impressed technically with the ploy of sending a pretend foaming, rabid attack dog over to the other side to drive the non-rabid back to your own team, and I think Coulter certainly does this, I can't help at be dismayed at her other effect: planting hideously offensive slogans in the mouths of the mouth-breathing element on the right. Kill them, convert their children to Christianity sort of stuff.

So unless she's already gone "off the reservation" -- in which case the rabid dog analogy needs to come to its analogical conclusion -- could Coulter's Democrat handlers please broadcast the "deactivate" code? Your experiement worked. Setting up Coulter as a sort of Republican Howard Campbell Jr. was fun, and you pulled it off, but please read the rest of Vonnegut's "Mother Night". You are what you pretend to be.

Doug, I am somewhat swayed by your defense of Bobcat. Though I still think he overdid his squelching clown act, I certainly did not mean to suggest he can't make a comeback, especially in the role of director. But I concede the point: Sam Kinison has more in common with Coulter.

Jaibe, I was taking some rhetorical liberties—intentionally overstating the case—when I said that almost every candidate wants to double the number of engineers. But it sure seems that way. There is a steady drumbeat on the issue of American science education, which tugs at voter insecurity over jobs and the growing unease with India and China as intellectual powerhouses. Off the top of my head, I can point to the following: President Bush, who is not facing reelection but remains in campaign mode, called for more math and science investment in the State of the Union. Newt Gingrich has been speaking of the issue. Hillary Clinton co-sponsored a bill in January to increase science education, and Bill Frist has proposed his own grant program to tackle the problem.

As a Virginia resident I have had to live through George Allen as governor and now a term as Senator. If he becomes President I will have to leave the country for good. He's such a smarmy dullard I can't stand him or his Howdy-Doody face. Maybe his tobacco chewing will catch up to him in time.

Hi Michael --

Thanks for your answer. But it does sound like you are confounding science and engineering, though to be fair, clearly Bush is only interested in the latter.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that a lot of this anti-evolution rhetoric is about trying to undermine the methodology that is giving all the answers that the right doesn't like --- global warming, environmental degredation, political science showing that Fox watchers are more likely to believe misinformation than PBS watchers (e.g. about whether WMD were found in Iraq or Hussein had anything to do with Sept 11). This administration only likes people who follow the party line, and science doesn't let you do that. Science tends to converge on the truth.

Engineering on the other hand is mostly about building things. It's important too, but it's politically agnostic.

After world war II, science and engineering were held up together as having won the war, and even into the seventies we were told science was noble and engineering lucrative when I was in school. But now a scary number of people think the title "Prof." is less impressive than the title "Dr." This is partly because of the misinformation about all academics being liberal after they "voted for Gore". In fact, academics voted for Gore in the same proportion and the rest of the communities they lived in. The famous survey showing 70% voting for Gore (in contrast to 50% of the nation) only surveyed the top 10 universities in the country. What conservatives should worry about why those are all in liberal areas (except Duke, & maybe UCSD.)