The smiling Ms. Coulter
Have you seen Ann Coulter’s latest black eyes? They’re not on her but on the people she hates the most: Liberals. With her newest mein kampfian tome, “Guilty,” Coulter has swung her metaphorical fists of fury at the faces of liberals everywhere, trying to bruise and batter them — not into submission but admission. An admission that they’re whiners. An admission that they’re hypocritical. An admission that they’re wrong about everything.
Subtitled “Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assult on America,” Coulter’s book features the kind of bromides and put-downs that have made this blonde skeleton a pop-culture fixture for more than a decade. A small example: Barack Obama is dismissed as a “Matinee Idol” who “insulted” his white mother by publicly identifying himself as black. Coulter complains that Obama and other famous Americans with mixed white-and-black ancestry (Halle Berry, et al.) “prefer to see the glass as half black.” Tah-dum.
Other groups Coulter has savaged include Jews, Muslims, 9/11 widows, and Vietnam veterans, but is it all just a game to Coulter? Is she a serious conservative intellectual – someone who, in the tradition of Disraeli (or even Ronald Reagan) wants to influence public discourse – or a kind of P.T. Barnum who does anything to be provocative, stay in the spotlight, and rake in millions of dollars? Let’s put it this way: When Coulter debated comic Bill Maher in a series sponsored by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, tickets went as high as $179.50. More people are realizing that Coulter’s barbs are big business. Those who once walked around with black eyes from Coulter include Bill Clinton (the subject of Coulter’s first book), anti-landmine activist Bobby Muller, and Dan Rather (who in “Slander” was charged with spreading false accusations against Republicans), but new Coulter targets (and critics) are taking a page from the playbook of Peter Finch’s character in “Network” and saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this from Coulter anymore.”
When Coulter visited the set of ABC’s “The View,” Whoopi Goldberg confronted her about her ideas on single motherhood (Coulter blames single mothers for spawning criminals) and other subjects, then – when Coulter began whining herself – Goldberg opined, “You can dish it out but you can’t take it.” Coulter had no adequate response. She can talk a good game, but Coulter’s inflated reputation is taking a pounding, and the black cocktail dress she likes to wear in public (see the cover of “Guilty”) has become the perfect symbol of Coulter’s new status: Skimpy ideologue.
Jonathan Curiel's Blog 
American stick insect.
Wow she looks like a lemur in that picture. Probably best to ignore her, rather than feed her WWF-style political drama.
I’m waiting to see if the Republican firing squads soon turn on her…depending on how she starts to poll with Independent voters. About a third of Independents don’t like Rush, so the conservative pragmatists — like David Frum or Matt Continetti at ‘The Weekly Standard’ — are trying to marginalize him, while the ‘stick to our principles’ conservatives like the bloviating Jay Nordlinger at The National Review’ are defending him. I suspect Coulter’s fate will depend on whatever solution the R’s find to resolve their current identity crisis. I’m pulling for the pragmatists, since their solution lies in a moderation that will pull them leftward to a place where I think nation really is…
Anyway, Coulter makes my blood boil, but I was a little disappointed to see the ‘Mein Kampfian’ parallel. A liberal who has somehow become obsessed with reading right-wing media, one criticism I see time and again on their pages is that the left just can’t stop comparing figures on the right to Hitler (and, to be fair, some on the right have done this to lefties like Howard Dean). Their claim is that it’s histrionic, and contributes to the shredding of our discourse in a way that pushes each side further away from the other. I have to say it’s one point I agree with them on, even when aimed at figures like Coulter, who seems to win biggest when she causes the left to break.