Bipartistan coulterism: who's meaner, conservatives or liberals?

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns

LAST JUNE THE Democratic National Committee sponsored an ad portraying the president as Frankenstein creating a monster for a federal judgeship. This, Fox News host Scan Hannity declared, was a typical example of Democratic demonization. "They're obviously being pretty mean-spirited here," he said, "as they usually are."

Confronted with this accusation, Democratic consultant Victor Kamber parried, "It's the Republicans that have been the hate mongers in the past campaigns." Hannity's mild-mannered liberal co-host Alan Colmes inquired of another guest, "You think Democrats are a lot meaner than Republicans?"

Actually, conservatives have been doing quite well in the meanness sweepstakes, thanks largely to the impressive efforts of Ann Coulter. The right-wing pundit's latest book, Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, attempts, among other things, to rehabilitate Sen.Joe McCarthy.

It opens with guns blazing: "Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." And so it goes, for nearly 300 more pages: "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down."

Coulter's sweeping generalizations, which can't distinguish Democratic Cold Warriors from Democratic fellow travelers, have alienated even some of her usual supporters (though not Hannity). But none of the nastiness or hysteria in Treason is new. Coulter has, after all, jokingly wished assassination on Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta and not-so-jokingly accused Mineta of "burning with hatred for America" because he opposes racial profiling in airport screening. Her long rap sheet of hateful remarks includes this gem from a speech last year to the Conservative Political Action Committee: "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too."

I've long been baffled to see so many conservatives defend Coulter as a fiery and witty, if over-the-top, polemicist. Reviewing her previous book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, in The Weekly Standard...