Coulter clash.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie

IN A WORLD OF LARGELY STATIC talking heads, there is no pundit more kinetic than Ann Coulter. She bobs her head, she shifts in her seat, she moves her hair around. She does more things with her mouth and eyes and eyebrows in one segment of a talk show than Jack Germond did in a decade on "The McLaughlin Group." She is also fast. She thinks fast, she talks fast, she blurts, she gasps, she interrupts, she makes noises of exasperation and disgust. She is also forceful, stating her opinions firmly and supporting them with facts. She has mastered the art of the talk show, of winning the segment, of getting the last word in before the commercial break or before the host changes the subject. All these elements together make her a formidable television presence.

Why, then, she would ever write a book is beyond me. Words just sit there. They don't move. They don't go away. The author's media-genic advantages and her theatricality are nullified. Her speed of thought and speech are useless. The pages accumulate, revealing every inconsistency, every mistake, every bad habit, every crutch. If I were Ann Coulter, and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right was the best book I could produce, I would never write another word.

Slander is basically a tour d'horizon of recent American politics during which Coulter reviews liberal commentary about personalities and events and attempts to show how very, very, very wrong liberals have always, always, always been. And not always just wrong, but also mean, and unkind, and unfair. At the same time, she attempts to show how conservatives were always right, and how they were also scrupulous, precise, and consistently aboveboard and high-minded. The book does not try to argue, say that Ronald Reagan was a great president, or that George W. Bush is a capable leader, or that Al Gore would have been a poor leader, or that the Republicans won the Florida election in 2000 fair and square. To argue those points would be too timid. Coulter's approach is to treat these and other precepts of the right as immutable laws of nature, and then to treat anyone who would object to them as un-American or heretical or lunatic

Does it sound like I'm skewing what Coulter says? Here are some typical sentences:

"Every pernicious idea to come down the pike is instantly embraced by liberals to prove how powerful they are. Liberals hate society."

"Liberals hate America."

"[Liberals] are painfully self-righteous, they have fantastic...