Bitch Goddess: Ann Coulter's perverse appeal.

• Author: Rimensnyder, Sara

On September 13, 2001, columnist Ann Coulter offered up the single most infamous foreign policy suggestion inspired by 9/11. Writing about Muslims, she declared, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Until then, Coulter was best known as a TV pundit whose stock in trade was tossing her platinum haystack while firing off the sort of conservative bon mots more typically associated with Rush Limbaugh than with leggy blondes.

Since Coulter advocated conversion by the sword, her stock has really blown through the roof, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown), her recent, hilariously shrill treatise on "liberal hate," has topped the New York Times bestseller list.

Because Slander breaks no new ground in uncovering what it claims is ubiquitous anti-conservative media bias, its smashing success raises a interesting question: Who the hell bought this book? Coulter, after all, is plainly one of the mast intentionally infuriating commentators at work today. Who else would end a treatise on slanderous Liberals with the sweeping declaration that they are "savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans and lie for sport"? Whether you're a lefty, a centrist, or a libertarian, there's plenty in the book to scorn.

Indeed, Coulter is such an inveterate nest fouler that she has even managed to alienate parts of her right-wing constituency. During the fracas over her Muslims column and a related one advocating the profiling of "suspicious-looking swarthy males," National Review Online dropped her column, citing journalistic concerns. Coulter responded by slagging the Review's editorial staff as "just girly-boys."

Conservatives--even, one suspects, the red-faced crew at National Review--have a ready explanation for Slander's best-selling status. The book's success, like that of Bernard Goldberg's Bias, Fox News Channel, Rush Limbaugh, and any number of rightward-ho newspaper columnists, is evidence of America's "silent majority." Legions of conservatives, goes this story, are tired of being ignored by the yogurt-lunching liberal commissars who control the media from Manhattan and Hollywood. Slander is a hit, then, because it tells the truths that Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and other smug liberal media mavens refuse to discuss.

Well, maybe. But it's as likely that Coulter's success depends not on her admirers but on those who can't stand the lady. She's the best kind of straw man--a straw...