My eyes glazed over. It was almost as if I watched myself watching Joe Scarborough -- an out-of-body experience, like people who lie dying on operating-room tables. Somewhere in the middle of the hour, Joe went off on Ann Coulter. His guest, Coulter-clone Debbie Schlussel, defended Coulter's ideas while saying her words were a bit harsh. She then derided the left for not speaking out against Ward Churchill, as if a leftwing professor who was in the news for all of a couple weeks compares in any way to a woman who has had three No. 1 bestsellers and is considered one of the leading mouthpieces of the right.

I understand people like Scarborough and Bill O'Reilly distancing themselves from Ann Coulter. The most oft-quoted offending lines of Coulter's new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, regard the 9/11 widows. They are as follows: "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arrazies. ... I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much. ... And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?"

This is the sort of thing that even conservative talking heads find vaguely offensive, though a few of them, like Sean Hannity, rushed to Ann's defense. But, not wanting to invoke the ire of viewers and drive down precious market share, many conservative TV hosts disavowed Ann. I can understand that.

What I don't get is the outrage coming from the left. How in the world could the left be angry about Ann? This woman is the greatest satirist of conservative punditry in the history of the nation. Stephen Colbert only wishes he were Ann Coulter. I mean, come on! Does anything roast conservative hypocrisy more than Ann Coulter calling any other woman, much less 9/11 widows, "harpies"? Hilarious!

Ann, you're the best. Don't ever change.

Ann "Orexic" Coulter. For God's sake, somebody give this lady a cheeseburger

Of course, Ann Coulter being Ann Coulter wasn't the biggest news of last week. No, that went to terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom the U.S. took out with two 500-pound bombs (cue either OutKast's "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)" or The Gap Band's "You Dropped a Bomb on Me"), depriving Ann Coulter of a possible mate.

Oh, sure. Either laugh or cringe at that joke. But you just know the two had a lot in common. Behold!
Ann:

Zarqawi:

Of course, that's not the whole case. If all you needed to be paired up with Coulter was a mutual love of firearms, I'd be next in line. But, when you couple that with Zarqawi and Coulter's shared views on things like women's rights and political discourse, it all starts to make sense. Now who's Ann supposed to date?

In any case, the death of Zarqawi brought out the usual claims from the left that this will solve little, followed by the usual claims from the right that the left loves terrorists because they're not greeting Zarqawi's death with the utterly credulous belief that this marks the end of the insurgency in Iraq. The problem with the right's view on this can be found in the person to whom they most compare the dead terrorist. The right is fond of comparing Zarqawi to this guy:

You know, Adolph Hitler -- that colossally evil dude with the funny moustache

When they should be comparing him to this guy:

Pablo "El Padrino" Escobar -- that other colossally evil dude with the funny moustache

One thing the left got right, which would have changed the war on terror entirely, had Al Gore been in office on 9/11/01, is that terrorists should be compared with thugs and common organized criminals, not dictators and the standing armies of nation-states.
When Hitler dies, it's the end of World War II, and Germany goes back to peaceful ways like a good little Laederhosen-clad boy. But what happened after Colombian police -- aided by U.S. Special Forces -- assassinated Pablo Escobar?
The cocaine trade became worse than ever. Without one leader regulating the black market economy, a bunch of mini-Pablos sprung up, each determined to get his share of the pie. The amount of cocaine entering the United States skyrocketed upward.
By the same token, the death of Zarqawi will create multiple would-be Zarqawis, leading to more groups committing terrorist acts. So when the left says the death of Zarqawi could be a bad thing, they're right. The problem with conservative views of the war on terror is that every bit of news is treated as though it's inside a vaccuum. Without looking at the larger ramifications, Zarqawi's death is a good thing, of course. But not looking at the larger picture -- things like formulating an exit strategy, for example -- is what got us here in the first place.