Excerpt from New York magazine cover (via Eat the Press) story on Stephen Colbert, written by Adam Sternbergh:
“Of course, I’m not trying to equate Coulter with Colbert. For starters, Coulter is a shrill, abusive demagogue and Colbert just plays one on TV. But with Coulter, there’s always been a sturdy suspicion that she is playing a character (like Colbert) and amping up the obnoxious rhetoric for maximum effect (like Colbert). When I mention the comparison to Colbert, though, he seems surprised, even unnerved. “I don’t really think about her much,” he says. “She’s a self-generating bogeyman. She’s like someone who wants attention for having been bad.” Given that he’s hosted right-wing true believers like Joe Scarborough before, and has often said he’d love to have Bill O’Reilly on the show, would he ever invite Coulter as a guest? “My sense is that she’s playing a character,” he says. “I don’t need another character. There’s one character on my show, and that’s me.”
And here’s an amusing list of statements by either Stephen Colbert or Ann Coulter. See if you can tell who said what:
1. “Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They don’t have the energy. If they had that much energy, they’d have indoor plumbing by now.”
2. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell.”
3. “I just think Rosa Parks was overrated. Last time I checked, she got famous for breaking the law.”
4. “Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of ‘Kill everyone who doesn’t smell bad and answer to the name Muhammad.'”
5. “I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.”
6. “[North Korea] is a major threat. I just think it would be fun to nuke them and have it be a warning to the rest of the world.”
7. “Isn’t an agnostic just an atheist without balls?”
You can read the full Eat the Press post here.