Individual Rights Apply Only to Individuals

I rarely bother to read Ann Coulter anymore, but happened upon a piece by her yesterday that was so full of barbs and red meat for theocrats that Poe's Law kicked in.

Thank goodness for bylines, I guess.

In any event, one passage was worth reading, as an indication of how bad America's political situation is, given that the conservatives hold themselves out as the great hope against the totalitarian left.

Within the piece, we have Coulter purporting to explain why she is glad that it was Samuel Alito, and not Harriet Myers, who ended up appointed to that seat on the Supreme Court.

Which is funny: My distinct impression at the time was that the whole reason Myers was nominated was that, as Bush's lapdog, she would basically be a vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade when the time came.

The only thing I can see Alito bringing that Myers wouldn't here is a patina of intellectual respectability that the previous nominee was plainly incapable of bringing to a writeup of such an opinion.

Perhaps raving like we see in this column is how Coulter expresses relief that the draft wasn't written by someone whose intellectual reputation was more in line with its quality:

I was never a huge fan of W, but I had assumed we were basically on the same side. With the Miers nomination, there was a total fissure: we had nothing in common, he was not a real conservative, and he was almost assuredly as stupid as the left said he was. It was like finding out your dog is really a cat. Soon after Bush was elected in 2000, I sat next to his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, at a dinner. Speaking on behalf of right-wingers, I told him, "We don't care if Bush gets us in a war, raises taxes, tanks the economy. All we care about is the Supreme Court." Conservative lawyers had been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. But when a rare Supreme Court opening came up, W spurned a movement built by the likes of Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and the Federalist Society to nominate ... his personal lawyer. Did I mention she was president of the Texas Bar Association? [bold added]

So much for national defense, a free economy, or individual rights -- the things that have allowed voters like me to hold our noses and vote for Republicans all these years...

Per Ann Coulter, conservatives don't care about any of that (beyond maybe luring voters), so long as they can draft any woman who gets raped or whose contraceptives fail into twenty years of raising a child she may not want or be prepared to care for.

And as for principles, which Coulter mentions at least twice regarding Alito, respect for individual rights is hardly one of them, as we plainly just got from the horse's mouth. But in case there is any doubt, Yaron Brook makes it quite clear while reviewing the text of the leaked draft opinion. His podcast on this is embedded above.

-- CAV