Sarcastic battleaxe chunks again

It's hard to take Ann Coulter out of context — she sort of wears her own musk like a Neanderthal wolfpelt — but it's clear that her "camel" flipoff came as a sarcastic retort to the crowd exhorting her to "Answer the question!" posed by Fatima Al-Dhaher, a 17-year-old Muslim student at Canada's University of Western Ontario.

You do sort of get the impression that Coulter learned her provocation early. It's every woman's right to drop a perfumed handerchief, of course, but very few have the satchel to toss it into a bear pit. She was born in the right culture for it. Americans like a smartass woman, evidently. Genghis Khan would have nailed Coulter's tongue to the tabletop by now.

Coulter says her sarcasm was "satire." Nonsense. This is satire; what Coulter does is sarcasm. It's all about scale. If a big man carries a Louisville Slugger to protect himself from a kitten, that's sarcasm. If the kitten carries a bottle of aspirin to cure the headache afterward, that's satire.

The kid used an open mike to ask Coulter a pointed question — that's not even heckling. Coulter, nonplussed, lost her cool, forgot where she was, and came out swinging like a punch-drunk palooka. Her target was all of Canada, by that point, and the world laughed at her. Paranoid much?