Ann Coulter, the right wing's dial-900 girl, a rail-thin, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, big-eyed leggy blonde who winkingly serves up X-rated ideological smut on liberals, is at it again.
"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes, or sneers, in Treason, her follow-up effort to the best-selling Slander. Like its predecessor, Treason sits atop the best-seller charts, riding higher than one of Coulter's signature miniskirts.
But this time around, it isn't the liberals who are up in arms, it's the conservatives.
Coulter's slurring of Democrats from Harry Truman (soft on communism) to Tom Daschle (soft on Iraq) has set off a howling chorus on the right. David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, among others, have been sternly giving Coulter history lessons, dredging up (once more) the old anti-Communist credentials of Cold War liberals like Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey. She may have nailed it for new liberal Democrats, but she can't hang pro-communist tags on those old guys.
Ann Coulter may have committed "treason" against conservative good taste.
But she's done the rest of us a favor. She has exposed the often empty semantic difference between the "responsible" right and its supposed "fringe."
Besides -- she's a *****.
