Ann Coulter, that perfect storm of provocative irrelevance, appeared today on The View to shill her latest book, "Guilty."  During the "Hot Topics" segment of the show, before Ann came out for her interview, several of the show's cohosts criticized a section of Coulter's book which criticizes single mothers, particularly famous actresses who become single mothers to, in Coulter's opinion, further their own careers. Cohost Whoopi Goldberg, who raised her daughter as a single mother, took offense with Coulter's arguments.

When Coulter came out a few minutes later, she derailed a conversation about other topics in her book (namely, her criticism of people like Barack Obama and Halle Berry for embracing their African-American sides instead of the race of their white mothers) by referring to the "Hot Topics" discussion of her book. "I have never heard my book read aloud like you're reading Mein Kampf," she sniffed. Sadly, Barbara Walters did not reach across the table and throttle Coulter at that second.

A full clip of the Mein Kampf reference is available at Jezebel.com. What do you think: valid complaint, or blatant cry for attention?

She's not happy he's gone, perish the thought. She just sees the silver lining in his passing:

Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. I hope they stop laughing about the Reds long enough to talk to God about smiting some liberals for me.

And this is merely a closing rhetorical flourish. Who among us wouldn't be moved by the death of our parents to ponder how much we hate Ted Kennedy, how abortion is infanticide, how Ted Kennedy isn't a good Catholic, how unions are corrupt and how John Edwards is a faggot?

What a strange person.

Hat tip: Scoop Shachtman.

 

Well, let's get one thing out of the way at the start:

COULTER: Do you know what Christianity is? We believe your religion [Judaism], but you have to obey.

DEUTSCH: No, no, no, but I mean --

COULTER: We have the fast-track program.

DEUTSCH: Why don't I put you with the head of Iran? I mean, come on. You can't believe that.

COULTER: The head of Iran is not a Christian.

DEUTSCH: No, but in fact, "Let's wipe Israel" --

COULTER: I don't know if you've been paying attention.

DEUTSCH: "Let's wipe Israel off the earth." I mean, what, no Jews?

COULTER: No, we think -- we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.

DEUTSCH: Wow, you didn't really say that, did you?

COULTER: Yes. That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. We know we're all sinners --

DEUTSCH: In my old days, I would have argued -- when you say something absurd like that, there's no --

COULTER: What's absurd?

DEUTSCH: Jews are going to be perfected. I'm going to go off and try to perfect myself --

COULTER: Well, that's what the New Testament says.

"A drag queen impersonating a fascist" was Andrew Sullivan's line to describe Ann Coulter, whose last book Godless: The Church of Liberalism was released on the New Testament-friendly date 6/6/06.

In a way, there's a macabre allure to Coulter, who at least cuts through the cant and bullshit of most television commentary and gets right down to business. 9/11 widows? Marinating in their own grief. Elizabeth Edwards? A hulking shrew of a wannabe First Lady married to a "faggot."

She is rather like a Cabaret act gone awry: What's she going to say this time? is how viewers right and left approach the spindly Nordic mean girl, like so many embarrassed i-bankers getting lap dances at Lucky Cheng's.

Coulter famously advocated converting Muslims to Christianity after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. This occurred in the pages of The National Review and promptly led to her sacking by Jonah "the Lionhearted" Goldberg. (Coulter might also be careful, lest her column be yanked from Jewish World Review, one of the only high-trafficked internet portals, along with Human Events, to continue to publish it.) And if you bother to read Godless, which I did, you'll find that she actually sympathizes with the Taliban when it comes to their method for dealing with queers: dropping walls on them.

Coulter is the anti-matter of sensationalism and she knows it. She could elope with John Walker Lindh in Vegas and bomb an abortion clinic on the way home and the public outrage would only ever register as the idiom of the brain-dead sitcom: "That's our Ann!"

• Army wives watching Lifetime's most popular show ever: "Army Wives." [The New York Times]
  
• Protestant parishioners "squatting in sleeping bags" in German church. Why? To keep Jews from turning it into a synagogue. [The Week Magazine]
• Elizabeth Edwards pleads with conservative broadcaster Ann Coulter to chill with attacks on her husband and other Democrats. [SFGate.com]
• At NYC fundraiser for Hillary, Buffett blasts American tax system. [TimesOnline]
• Senate subpoenas the White House and Cheney's office over eavesdropping. [myway]
• A conservative argues for Cheney's impeachment. [Slate]
• PC Magazine compares the iPhone hype to Hitler. [cubiclesurfing.com]
• Clarence Thomas and Supreme Court got it all wrong in student free-speech ruling. [The LA Times]
  

I've never understood the claim made by some liberal males of my acquaintance that they'd like to fuck Ann Coulter. Specifically, what they claim is that they'd like to "hate-fuck" her, much the same way Craigslist users with personal ads professed a strong interest, during the 2004 RNC in New York, to want to exact their vengeance on red state America by busting a cathartic nut with the help of visiting Republican bodies. Usually the scenario took the form of angry lefty male seeking self-satisfied but insane righty female, but the gender-political split occasionally went the other way, too.

As for Ms. Coulter, my distaste is this. Physically, she totals lesser than the sum of her parts rather the way Daryl Hannah does. Emotionally, her confessions of hysterical virginity don't do much to entice, even though the Aryan Jeanne d'Arc talk practically curls the pages of her notorious books with all its heavy panting.

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson that he'd "sooner try to open a sardine can with my penis" than apply that Russian organ to any of the belabored and strangely unerotic harlots that appeared in Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County, a book of short stories whose enusing indecency troubles in the courts (and successes on the bestsellers list) also nourished Nabokov's idea for his own salacious masterpiece. The sardine can test is one that I dutifully apply to right-wing punditrixes.

But so far the only one who passes with flying colors is Michelle Malkin. As if reading my own filthy mind, she goes and ups the ante with her painfully unfunny but painfully titillating "Hot Air" video denouncing Congressional Democrats who favor a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq:

 

The ever-popular "Jewish" political satirist vlogger Atlas tackles Ann Coulter. Can someone please explain this woman's appeal? Aside from doing a really bad Fran Drescher impersonation?

For anyone that missed it this past summer...