DOWNLOADS: (793)

PLAYS: (3319)

Embed

Of course, we're all too familiar with Ann Coulter's schtick: Say something outrageous that will get you lots of attention, then compound it by saying something even more outrageous. It's all for show.

Yesterday on Fox News' weekly Geraldo Rivera show, Coulter was true to form, calling Vice President Joe Biden a "drunken Irishman":

Coulter: It almost is kind of effective to send out this drunken Irishman to respond to Dick Cheney. It's like sending out the White House dog. It's saying, 'We so don't respect you we're sending in Joe Biden.'

Funny how Ann Coulter always manages to sound like a Know Nothing, isn't it? She is, after all, the philosophical and cultural descendant of Bill the Butcher.

Coulter also told Rivera that she thinks Sarah Palin's not running for the presidency:

Coulter: I think I can save you a lot of trouble over the next three years. I don't even think Sarah Palin's going to run, and I think it's not particularly likely that she'll be our nominee. So she's huge, she's popular, she has enormous influence. The same can be said for Oprah, the same can be said for Rush Limbaugh. And I don't know why we have to keep asking in the media, 'Is she running for president?'

Of course, neither Oprah or Limbaugh are professional politicians with a history of office-seeking. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin, who now has no job outside of being a political celebrity -- while Oprah and Limbaugh both have lucrative day jobs. Of course she's running -- she just knows she can't announce too early.

We'll be saving this clip for the day Palin finally makes it official. Because Coulter, like so many right-wingers, has a terrific track record of being dead wrong.

But what really rankled Coulter was Joe Trippi's somewhat apt comparison of Palin to Jesse Jackson. This is more than Coulter can bear, who compulsively returns, like a dog to its vomit, to her earlier ethnic smear of Biden:

Coulter: How about comparing Joe Biden with Sarah Palin? She's twenty million times more qualified than he is.

Rivera: How do you say that? A two-year governor against a long Senate career. Anyway --

Coulter: How long are we gonna pretend Biden is not just some drunken Irishman embarrassing Obama?

Yeh, that's pretty damned funny. While Joe Biden served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee for 30 years, Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, where her most important policy issues involved where to place sewage-treatment plants and whether or not to pave certain roads in town, and then served two brief years as the governor of one of the smallest state electorates in the nation. Twenty million more times, indeed.

DOWNLOADS: (1508)

PLAYS: (5379)

Embed

Now, that's what I call a conspiracy theory: Andrew Breitbart told Glenn Beck on Friday that he thinks that Oprah Winfrey is the real power behind the Obama throne:

Breitbart: Well, this doesn’t surprise me. Does it surprise you? This is the Oprah Winfrey presidency. She was his biggest supporter, and I think that she’s been behind the scenes orchestrating this presidency as a media presidency, photo ops, giving billions of dollars of gifts away to people and to companies like General Electric, and until the mainstream media starts realizing --

Beck: Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that Barack Obama walks into a room and goes, "GE CEOs, look under your seat!"

Breitbart: I think that's exactly what it is.

Beck: You've got a bailout. Is that what you're suggesting?

Breitbart: That's exactly what I'm suggesting. It is the Oprah Winfrey presidency.

You know, it's funny: Fox never featured hosts who were upset about Fox' cozy relationships with the Republicans who made Rupert Murdoch's massive American media acquisitions possible for the past decade.

It never featured reports or talk-show hosts who even talked about former GE CEO Jack Welch's cozy relationship with the GOP and the Bush administration earlier this decade.

Evidently, they only object to such political coziness when Democrats do it. OK, we got that.

But what, exactly, does Oprah have to do with GE? The only business connection is that NBC bought Oxygen, the network Oprah cofounded, in 2007. But GE does not own Oprah's production company or have much of a relationship. (Her long-running TV show is distributed through King World Productions, a CBS operation.)

These people having been breathing some kind of exhaust and it's messing with their heads. Probably their own.

Of course, in the case of Breitbart, he's just being his usual a-hole self. Nothing new there.

DOWNLOADS: (1808)

PLAYS: (5120)

Embed

Watching Sarah Palin being interviewed is always a little like watching an incoherent art-student film or something from a William S. Burroughs fantasy. It obviously comes from a completely different planet in a different quadrant of the universe.

For example, among the things you learned by watching Palin on Sean Hannity's Fox News show last night were the following nuggets:

-- Palin still is unhappy with the McCain campaign for not having smeared Barack Obama enough with phony association-game stuff about Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright -- you know, issues Americans really cared about.

-- She seems to have been watching a lot of Glenn Beck, though, because she practically repeats Beck's favorite talking points about Obama's supposedly nefarious associations.

-- Palin says "it wasn't negative campaigning and it wasn't off-base to call someone out on their associations." Hmmmm. Well, when Max Blumenthal and I did just that with Palin over her lengthy far-right associations, she completely freaked out.

-- Obama is "dithering" in Afghanistan. And evidently, if Palin were president, the only people she would listen to regarding the use of troops would be generals. Civilian advisers? Fuggedaboutit.

-- The reason she "blew" the question in the Katie Couric interview about what she read? She was irked by Couric's "arrogance." Apparently it's arrogant of media folk to ask national politicians softball questions that every other politico on the planet can readily answer.

-- What does she read? The first publication she cites is NewsMax. Yep, that NewsMax: The folks who, in the late 1990s, were peddling "Y2K apocalypse" theories and Clinton "New World Order" conspiracy theories. The same NewsMax that recently published a piece extolling the virtues of a military coup in order to remove Obama.

One thing that I think will become obvious in the coming weeks: Palin will not risk any more Katie Couric interviews. She will be completely ensconced only with friendly interviewers like Hannity. Oprah will have been her most risky interview.