A volcano on the landscape of the right

How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)

The World According to Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter

Crown Forum: 354 pp., $26.95

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Long before I ever heard of Ann Coulter, the Miss Mullah of the Peroxide Right, I had scribbled the outlines of a story about a woman -- a progressive author and commentator -- who was losing earning power because the field was so crowded with other progressive women authors and commentators, inasmuch as women were, in the main, smart enough to realize where their political and personal interests lay.

Applying supply-and-demand principles, the woman dyed her hair blond and underwent an equally artificial and calculated political conversion into that rara and well-paid avis, a right-wing sound-bite babe. This worked fine until she almost lost her family and her guy because of their contempt for her faux self. So she let her hair go back to its real color, got her ego out of the blind trust, and talked and wrote happily ever after.

Coulter very likely believes everything she says and writes, which makes her far more entertaining than my wimpy protagonist. She stands out even in that overpopulated right field misnamed "talking" heads. The talking is closer to yelling, and the palm goes to the man or woman who can holler the loudest and weirdest, and in this Coulter has made the niche her own. There's something marvelously brazen about the bubble she has blown for herself to inhabit, like the fabulous San Francisco eccentric who declared himself to be emperor of the United States and whose "subjects" humored him to the extent of printing his scrip for him and picking up his restaurant tabs. I wouldn't find Coulter nearly so engaging if this were an act, if she were not her own first and best true believer.

"How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)" is a collection of her commentaries and her fourth book. Remember the moment in the Harry Potter film when an animated message for one young wizard from his mum comes screeching into school and starts berating him publicly? It's called a howler, and that's what her writings are. They leap off the pages and begin scolding. Of course she sticks up for the Confederate battle flag, Joe McCarthy and Elian's Miami Relatives. Of course she finds nothing admirable in the American Bar Assn. or the Clinton or Kennedy family trees -- although she wrote for George magazine.