As a black conservative on the Post’s editorial page and former aide to Newt Gingrich, Robert George is used to showing up where people may not expect him. At the Laughing Liberally comedyfest, he cracked up at Julie Goldman’s routine about lesbian soldiers who could terrify insurgents by flashing their “holes to hell,” but when Jim David called Ann Coulter “an emissary from Planet Cunt,” George stopped laughing. “That’s not comedy, that’s just crass,” he said. Afterward, George caught up with Goldman and suggested she vote Republican: “After all, who’s more pro-Bush than you?” No response; she walked away. Happy with that excursion, a few days later, George hit the third-anniversary party of Drinking Liberally, a national club of left-wing lushes. There, “just like at a Republican event, when another black guy arrived, and in this case it was [Councilman] Bill Perkins, the number of black people in the room instantly doubled,” he says. “The conservatives and liberals have more in common than they think.”

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