How To Read Ann Coulter If You Must

James Dewey Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, recently resigned as chancellor of Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for making racially insensitive remarks. But don't expect Ann Coulter to step down from the public spotlight anytime soon.

Especially as Islamo fascism tours take off on college campuses.

Even though the conservative pundit called former Vice President Al Gore and Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards the "f" word for gay, ridiculed 9/11 widows, claimed Ambassador to France Pamela Harriman "slept her way to the top," told disabled Vietnam veteran and former Georgia Senator Max Cleland, "People like you caused us to lose that war," recommended poisoning Supreme Court Justice Stevens, called reporter Helen Thomas an "old Arab," called Senator John Kerry a kept spouse and claimed she suffered more listening to Abu Ghraib stories than did the inmates, the conservative pundit is not big on self correction.

In fact she felt so ashamed about the lapses she says she "couldn't stop laughing."

Still there are signs Coulter's career might be on decrescendo judging from the melodramatic and dated tone to her new bestseller, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd be Republicans. (Coulter doesn't write books; she writes "bestsellers.")

"True, it was heartless of me to question whether al Qaeda had specifically targeted the Jersey Girls' husbands and whether the other 2,994 victims were just collateral damage. I should have just told them to 'put some ice on that,' as Juanita Broaddrick says Hillary's husband did after raping her."

Got that?

"Liberals are racked by self-loathing as the result of some traumatic incident--say, driving drunk off a bridge with your mistress passed out in the back seat and letting the poor girl drown because you're a married man and a U.S. Senator, just to take one utterly random, hypothetical example off the top of my head."

And that?

Coulter doesn't seem to realize Chappaquiddick and Bill Clinton's infidelities are not high on the public's indignation scale anymore. Same with "[Clinton's] groping Kathleen Willey simultaneously with her own spouse committing suicide."

And what is a proponent of family values doing naming chapters, Bill Clinton: He Left a Mark on History That May Never Come Out--wink wink--and making Moby Dick jokes anyway?

Also dated is Coulter's polarizing "us and them" language.

"How about attacks on gays? Maybe gay-bashers are just tired of being told they have no sense of style."

"It's always the same people who characterize puncturing a baby's skull and sucking the brains out a 'constitutional right' who rise in self-righteous moral condemnation over some harmless little joke I've told."

Don't think joke one is funny? You're probably in category two!

Then there's feminism.

Maybe Coulter was so jonesing for another R rated Bill joke--the joke: Hillary will be "the first woman in a Clinton administration to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office instead of under it,"--that she could overlook Clinton administration women like Janet Reno, Donna Shalala and Madeleine Albright.

It still doesn't excuse a line like, "If you've ever wondered whether the Democrats have become a bunch of women, consider that they have now adopted the feminists' motto: "That's not funny!"

Yes its1972-style woman bashing! Packed on ice from the days when classified ads read, "help wanted Gal Friday" and letters began, "Sir."

Even though it might be said of Coulter as it's been said of Madonna that she has the body of a hooker and the mind of a pimp, she still must realize that speaker and reader are not presumed male in 2007. And that the Speaker of the House, many senators and several governors are a bunch of women.

Finally, there's Coulter's writing itself--or to be more accurate, pasting. There is no bigger giveaway to creeping obsolescence and pedantry than quoting and repeating yourself.

Except for about 20 pages of new material, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans is nothing but out takes from previous books and forced attempts at one-liners.

And like the worse pastiche of homespun aphorisms, the sayings are thrown together without any order or organization.

Coulter even seems to recognize this shortcoming, making the joke early in the book that if she's too "disjointed.. Barack Obama might accuse me of stealing his act." No worries there.

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist for the Evanston Roundtable.

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