Never shying away from a potential stage storming, the Bwog staff attended last night’s speech by Ann Coulter.

As the crowd shuffled in through the long security lines for Ann Coulter‘s visit to Columbia, the same  question was on everyone’s mind–would it get crazy in Altschul? Outside the event someone had dropped leaflets instructing the audience to start singing a new version of “We Shall Overcome” (no joke), and inside students chattered excitedly. The event organizers were apprehensive as well, urging students to “keep an open mind and show her the respect she deserves.”

Well, no pies were thrown, and, aside from a few shushed heckles from the back, the audience didn’t lose its mind too much.“I never expected a welcome as warm as Ahmadinejad got at this University!” she said after striding on stage. But the “radical” denizens of Columbia appear to have learned their lesson from two years ago. Rather than drown out Coulter, students went so far as to shush hecklers, leading to a surprisingly entertaining evening of sharp exchanges.

Rather than the traditional harangue typical of controversial speakers, Coulter took a different approach, delivering one snappy anti-liberal witticism after the other. After chiding Obama for his Special Olympics joke, she followed with, “you think he’d be more sensitive…with Joe Biden as his Vice President.” And calling out liberals for taking offense at any mention of Obama’s middle name while mocking Dan Quayle for the middle name Danforth, she finished with, “Clinton’s name was Jefferson, so he should have had a black mistress.”

She continued with lines about media adoration of Obama, the liberalness of MSNBC and Guantanamo, which she called “the tropical resort Bush built while they waited for a Democratic President.” She noted that the average Guantanamo detainee has gained 20 pounds, adding, “This is a brutal POW camp? This is more like a freshman dorm” (Bwog assumes that, in this metaphor, JJ’s is the torture…the delicious, fried torture).

Her lecture was so much like a comedy act that she even had airplane food and mother-in-law jokes. “They don’t even feed us on airplanes anymore, you have to go Guantanamo to get that,” she said, followed by calling Guantanamo “Obama’s biggest problem…after his mother-in-law.” Unfortunately, Altschul did not have a drum kit for a “ba-dum-cha!”

She finished with her thoughts on waterboarding, the stale nature of ‘Hope and Change’ rhetoric and the future prospects of the GOP. Citing a poll that found most Germans have a favorable opinion of Obama, she noted that “we all know how good the Germans are at picking a great leader.”

The evening then transitioned into the question and answer period, which went on far longer than her speech. And, though a good number of the questions were confrontational, the crowd kept relatively calm. Coulter, veteran of thousands of talks around the country, dealt with most of the questions confidently, if rarely to the satisfaction of the audience.

In  response to a question on gay marriage, she asserted, “I’m against gay marriage…It’s solely, exclusively to create an environment to bring children into the world and make them civilized human beings.” Adding that the whole marriage debate didn’t matter anyway since “most of my [Coulter’s] gay friends” are against it and “most heterosexual men will tell you you want to be out of this one.”

Next came a question on social issues and what Republican can do to reclaim the Reagan big tent, to which she said, “we win on the social issues…[like] not having…kindergartners being taught fisting.” Suspicious that the audience did not get the message, she repeated the phrase several answers later, prompting more howls of laughter from the audience.

The Cornell graduate, successful businesswoman, and #1 fan of Sarah Palin went on to complain (sort of) facetiously that the “rash experimentation with women’s suffrage has gone too far” since “whenever women get the right to vote, government spending goes through the roof,” and she would “give it [the right to vote] up if the rest of you do, but not my education or my guns.” Take that, Spar.

It was pretty inevitable that ROTC was going to come up, but when it did, Coulter redirected the question to allow for maximum Columbia-hating, changing the subject to the missile defense system, saying “it should protect the whole country with pockets for Columbia and Hanover, New Hampshire” before the rest of her response was drowned out by laughter.

Though the questioners acquitted themselves well, none had managed to fit in any good jabs at Coulter until the last questioner finished with, “at the request of the gentlemen behind me, could you explain your fascination with fisting?” Coulter replied, “it’s the schools that are obsessed with it. They’re teaching it!” Another question handled, another questioner left unconvinced, and with a speaker whose idea of unity is “come over to my side,” it was remarkable that the evening went off as smoothly, and as entertainingly, as it did.

– DJB, JCD, ARK, and ECS; photo by Michael Hannon