More Horse

From Eugene Volokh we get a discussion of Horsemilkgate from a more right of center perspective. I agree with much of what Eugene says. I honestly find nothing wrong with Laura's lame jokes, particularly in light of the denunciations launched by some folks at NRO and by Michelle Malkin, who is quoted in Volokh's post.
I do disagree in that I find nothing wrong with a bit of nasty vulgarism. For example, if Whoopi Goldberg's mentioned remarks employing some sort of vulgar puns on the president's name were funny, then great. Since it's Whoopi, it probably wasn't funny. But still- who cares? Nobody was hurt. It wasn't a public event. The manufacture uproar in its wake was another instance of censorious blue-state conservatives making a mountain out of a molehill, which they certainly excel at.
So, back to Michelle Malkin. In addition to the fact that her outrage seems entirely manufactured, and she writes gushingly about some Heritage foundation jerk delivering an address calling for all the wingnuts in the audience to resist coursening the rhetoric of political discourse (I wonder if Ann Coulter, author of Treason, or Michael Savage, author of Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, were in attendence), she lets forth this gem:

Lighten up, you say? No thanks. I'd rather be a G-rated conservative who can only make my kids giggle than a South Park/Desperate Housewives conservative whose goal is getting Richard Gere and Jane Fonda to snicker. Giving the Hollyweird Left the last laugh is not my idea of success. . . .

Actually, Michelle should not only lighten up, but grow up as well.
But something about what she wrote made me think about that Michelle Maglalang. Her career owes a fair share of its success to her being perceived as attractive and exotic.
Quite a few right wing female pundits, including Ann Coulter and Malkin, owe some of their popularity to the fact that they are photogenic. I don't find them attractive, but much is certainly made of Coulter's long legs and blond hair. Pundits like Malkin can go out taking potshots at "Hollyweird" or insist that they are G-rated, but it seems odd to do that when half of what they're selling is sex.
There's something beautiful in the contradictions presented by figures like Coulter, Malkin, and, say, Dinesh D'Souza. One of the patterns of right-wing punditocracy of my lifetime is a tendency to play against type.
Coulter writes hateful things about feminism and women, Malkin justifies internment camps, D'Souza gives racism a non-white face. It fits into a category of argument the right uses elsewhere. In the place of even-the-female and even-the-ethnic appeals, we have, of course, even-the-liberal or even-the-Democrat appeals.
Figures like Zell Miller, large chunks of The New Republic magazine, and Ed Koch are frequently used to give cover to ugly and thoroughgoingly conservative arguments and policies.
I honestly don't think that this kind of behavior, whether it comes from Ann Coulter or Ed Koch, has its root in some sort of deep-seated self-loathing. But it strikes me as sad that people would debase themselves to an audience of angry Republican white Christian heterosexual men who would regard them as beneath contempt if they were working any job other than attacking Hillary Clinton for a living.