Coulter’s odd column on Deep Throat

While I don’t read her very often, it seems to me that over the past couple of years, in addition to becoming an irritatingly ubiquitous “commodity” on the conservative side of the Web, Ann Coulter has also been turning into a kind of a right-wing Maureen Dowd, a dame in a perpetual state of unfocused, generalized anger, often not even bothering to make a coherent argument. This is a real loss, as Coulter (unlike Dowd) is genuinely smart and has things to say. Thus, in her latest column, she makes a couple of surprising and disturbing points about Woodward and Bernstein’s account of Deep Throat, and their claim that Mark Felt is the man. She fires off the following tidbits: that Felt, at the FBI, had no way of knowing about the 18 minute gap in the tape, which Woodward and Bernstein claimed Deep Throat told them about; that Woodward’s apartment balcony in 1972 could not have been seen from outside the building in order for Deep Throat to see where Woodward had placed his flower pot as part of their pre-arranged system of signals; and that the newspapers delivered to Woodward’s apartment building were not earmarked for specific apartments, so Felt couldn’t have drawn a clock on Woodward’s newspaper.

In short, Coulter seems to be saying that Deep Throat did not exist. But why then are Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee claiming he did exist, and that Felt is he? Why would they have kept doughtily repeating over the past 30 years that they were bound not to reveal Deep Throat’s identity until after his death? Why would they have done all this? Coulter doesn’t bother saying. She offers no theory or explanation. She does nothing to attempt to tie together the startling information she has presented. Instead, she just keeps letting it pour out of her, in an angry flow, seemingly too distracted even to try to make sense. Again, one cannot help noticing a resemblance to the chronically infuriated Maureen Dowd.

The problem, at bottom, is a conservatism that increasingly has no principles of its own, a conservatism that stands for nothing except for attacking the left, and so (like the left itself) is losing the ability to make reasoned arguments.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 11, 2005 02:23 AM | Send