Ann Coulter, one of my favorite conservative Psycho Hose Beasts, has been pissing liberals off on a quite regular basis, and today Richard Cohen joins the mob with torches. This same column was titled "The Ann Coulter question: How to respond to a half-wit?" in my local paper. The titles of columns are picked by editors, which tells you something right there.

May I say something about Ann Coulter? She is a half-wit, a termagant, a dimwit, a blowhard, a worthless silicone nothing, physically ugly and could be likened to Eva Braun, who was Hitler's mistress. As it happens, these are all descriptions or characterizations Coulter uses for others in her book, "Slander." It ought to be called "Mirror."



The book is now the No. 1 bestseller in the nation. If I were writing this column as she has written the book, everything I wrote above would be footnoted. For instance, the deft Eva Braun crack was aimed at Katie Couric. Coulter calls the "Today" host "the affable Eva Braun of morning TV." You can, as they say, look it up (p. 181).

...This may explain how Coulter came up with a really tolerant way of dealing with the Islamic world: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," she wrote last fall in her National Review Online column. For some reason, the intolerant National Review fired her.



Islam spent hundreds of years spreading their religion by exactly that method, but I suppose irony is lost on some people.

Is it time for an intervention? I ask this because such anger, such intolerance, such rage, such a compulsion to denigrate and to distort is hardly based on any reality. If, as Coulter says, liberals control the media and much of the animal and plant kingdoms, then how is it that the president du jour and others of recent times -- Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush the Elder -- happen to be conservatives? I must be missing something here.

Maybe Reagan. Don't know about the rest, particularly Wage And Price Control Nixon. Most real conservatives have died out or been booted out of government by voters who don't want to hear about No Free Lunch.

Such harrumphing says something not only about Coulter but about her audience. Who are the people who read such tripe, who listen to talk radio and its chorus of conservatives (nary a liberal on the air) and who buy books such as the one under examination today?



What explains their rage and, while I am asking questions, could you think of another commentator -- especially one on the left -- who could have written what Coulter did about Muslims and go on to bestsellerdom? Being conservative is like being criminally insane: You can't be held accountable.



The Left doesn't write insulting stuff about Muslims. They write it about conservatives, and they spew it like a fire hose. The book "Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot" was a bestseller, to give just one example. "Stupid White Men" is still holding at about number 15 on the Amazon bestseller list. And those are just the titles. I don't recall Cohen getting huffy about the bitter, nasty and insulting treatment given conservatives in these books. In fact, both Franken and Moore are typically highly admired by liberals.