In the process of discussing Ann Coulter, Conrad gives some insight (possibly out-to-lunch as he admits he doesn't really know her personally) on Ann when media observers aren't present:
For now, I will put aside Mr. Moore’s comments about me — having been defamed by many more formidable slanderers in the last six years — and turn my attention to Ms. Coulter, a cordial sometime neighbour of mine in Palm Beach, a friend in fact.In a lot of ways its hard to get a good read on Ann, mostly because whenever she's interviewed she's always "in character". You'd have better luck getting 1980s WWF wrestlers to break kayfabe than her. Even when on the subject of her favourite recipe she manages to be deliberately baiting of liberals. (Though she did refer to something as "fruity" without further comment).
We disagree on many political subjects, often in hilariously animated exchanges, and she is a delightful and memorable personality. She is a well-educated lawyer, who clerked for a distinguished judge, has kept her university-era and other old friends, and is much preoccupied these days taking care of her unwell mother.
In his March 11 Post article, Mr. Moore wrote of Ms. Coulter with a sanctimony as broad and flat as the Canadian Prairies: “One wondered if even she took herself seriously,” in reference to her latest book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and their Assault on America.
I can report that she doesn’t, particularly, and never did. She is a rational conservative, slightly to the right of Ronald Reagan, and a practicing, middle-of-the-road Christian. This puts her within, albeit on the right side of, the American mainstream, a position that perhaps corresponds with Mr. Moore’s idea of the Middle Ages.
As she is in a highly competitive business (conservative commentary in a generally conservative country), she has developed some successful promotional techniques. She is the ne plus ultra of pulverizing and scandalizing the soft left, implying revisionism about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and Darwinian evolution, though she believes in due process and is not a creationist. She stakes out a number of positions on other current and philosophical issues, which provoke the holders of the conventional liberal wisdom to react like wounded animals, but she really differs only marginally from standard, respectable conservative views on most subjects.
