In many of the recent "Fahrenheit 9/11" inspired discussions of Michael Moore, our left-leaning blogger friends would attempt to defend their pudgy anti-hero by decrying what they considered the right's "journalists" of excess: Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Again and again anytime something was said against Mr. Moore we'd hear, "What about Limbaugh and Coulter, huh? Aren't they just as bad? Why don't you talk about them, huh?"

        I only had one response to that: I've never listened to Rush Limbaugh (and aside from his drug problems and ESPN job-losing comments I don't know anything about him) and who the hell is Ann Coulter? Never read her, don't know anything about her. But really, could a chickie-poo be all that bad?

        Yes, she can be.

        I just finished reading several of Ms. Coulter's op-ed pieces over at Yahoo. Good Lord, she's smarmier than I am! Who'd've thunk such a thing was possible? My impression from my initial exposure to Ms. Coulter? Just another smarmy, self-important ideologue with no regard for facts or truth. Why say something accurate when you can say something unsubstantiated? If you can't say something nasty -- you're not trying hard enough!

        She's so overboard it's enough to make one want to forever scrub interjecting humor into one's commentaries. What she's practicing isn't humor, it's mean-spiritedness taken to new lows. She titles her article on Bill Clinton's autobiography "Moby's Dick." It gets worse from there. Take this: "('My Life' was Clinton's second choice title, after the publisher balked at naming the book 'I Am God, and You Are All My Subjects.')" That's okay for standup comedy or a strictly humor piece, but it has no place in a newspaper, not even in the entertainment section. I could practically tear her commentaries apart line-by-line. In Ann Coulter's own parlance, she's forgotten the difference between making a joke and being one.

        As a personal comparison, Ann Coulter, for all her feigning of intellectual prowess, isn't in Michael Moore's league in talent, intellect, or sincerity. Michael Moore still knows how to be an entertainer. In fact, I'd say he's less of a documentarian than an entertainer. He uses his entertainments to push his beliefs. Ann Coulter is so mean-spirited and spouting off of far-right dogma that I can't imagine anyone finding her plausible or entertaining unless they were equally or further right of her in the Kool Aid line. (Actually, the more virulently ideological Moore becomes the less entertaining he is. He may very well someday equal or surpass Coulter, but I don't think he's there yet.) Coulter isn't funny, she's an embarrassment.

        The question of the moment, though, is does Ann Coulter serve as an excuse for Michael Moore? My response is, no.

        I find it bizarre someone would defend a person on the grounds of so-and-so being just as bad or worse. Have you never heard of "damning with faint praise?" To me that's like saying, "What do you mean you don't like Hitler? Isn't Attila the Hun just as bad? Huh? What about that?"

        Along those same lines, I don't care if all the other kids are doing it, we don't do it in this house! Just because the left can point fingers at ideologues of the right doesn't make the ideologues of any ilk or their illegitimate techniques valid. Incompetence is incompetence no matter who is doing it. Lying and distortion should not be permitted in the public arena period. If Michael Moore has used deception to make a point it is fully legitimate -- even a duty -- to point it out regardless of who else might be doing similarly disreputable things. We need standards. Expose them all!

        If you find Michael Moore is "as bad as Ann Coulter" (and after all, by saying the inverse, isn't this what you are acknowledging?) than why are you paying attention to any of them?