Can’t be true. Can it?

I fondly remember seeing the Dead when I was at Cornell. It was the day of the fabulous Fiji Island party on the driveway “island” of the Phi Gamma Delta House. We’d cover ourselves in purple Crisco and drink purple Kool-Aid mixed with grain alcohol and dance on the front yard. Wait – I think got the order reversed there: We’d drink purple Kool-Aid mixed with grain alcohol and then cover ourselves in purple Crisco – then the dancing. You probably had to be there to grasp how utterly fantastic this was.

At the L.A. Times, Meghan Daum mocks those who insist that Coulter’s a “satirist”:

Today, of course, “A Modest Proposal” is considered one of the greatest works of political satire in the English language. But isn’t that always the way? Comedy is tragedy plus time, which may explain why Ann Coulter, the Cruella De Vil of blond, ectomorphic wonkdom, is getting such a beating by the liberal and (more important) tragically literal mainstream media. Such is the price of being in the cultural vanguard. If you think Swift was cutting-edge, imagine having a wit so dry that even you haven’t yet realized you’re a satirist…

Coulter, with her lucky genes and shrewd marketing instincts, isn’t self-loathing enough to be a comedienne, but she’s a brilliant satirist in spite of herself. She can add tragedy to time, subtract actual humor, divide by the lowest common denominator and come up with “A Modest Proposal, 2006.” It was about time someone pimped up that rusty old tract.