He obviously has not checked out the Free Republic and other pro-Coulter websites.
Posted on 07/18/2002 6:28:40 PM PDT by Map Kernow
Believe what you read about Ann Coulter and you could be forgiven for wanting to skip a lunch date with her. Surf the web and you can take your pick - she is anything from a "Right-wing telebimbo", "America's favourite blonde neo-fascist" or "Ku Klux Coulter" to the "whore of babble on". She is also the "Queen of the Maneaters", a female friend warns me.
Coulter is not difficult to spot as she enters the chic La Goulue restaurant on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. She is rail-thin, wears a skirt so short that it would be better described as a small flannel, and leaves men staring in silent awe. "It's my total slutty look," she confides later.
It's a good thing I've got a tape recorder, she tells me breezily, because writers who take notes "always step on the punch line and make me sound like a pedestrian idiot".
Coulter is no idiot and few would describe her as pedestrian. With an Ivy League degree from Cornell, she went to law school before joining a corporate practice and working as legal counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Her book High Crimes and Misdemeanours became the definitive conservative case for impeaching President Bill Clinton and her syndicated columns gained a nationwide following.
She has also been a big hit on television since the Clinton scandals broke. Totally fearless, relentlessly combative and unwilling to brook any talk of mushy compromise, Miss Coulter is the ultimate pin-up for the militia crowd.
It all happened by accident, she says, happily. "It really was just God looking down and saying: 'We've got enough lawyers, I'm putting you on TV'."
Now she is sitting pretty at the top of the New York Times bestseller list with her second book, Slander, a devastating diatribe against the Left and all its works - the New York Times in particular.
Coulter's approach is not so much take no prisoners as capture one's opponents, string them up with piano wire, machine-gun them until all movement has ceased and then fire a celebratory volley into the air.
Her column written on September 11 concluded: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
When the next one called for passports to be required for domestic flights because they could be "checked with the home country in case of any suspicious-looking swarthy males", she was dropped from the conservative National Review and denounced by Left and Right alike.
Has this persuaded her to tone things down? "No, I have thought many times that I was being too circumspect and that I should have cut loose a little more," she chuckles. "Obviously, I engage in a lot of invective.
"But liberals can't tell the difference between invective that's true and invective that isn't true. My invective is backed up in my book with 35 pages of footnotes and examples. They just lie when they call people things."
She admits she is deliberately provocative. "Normally, when I write columns I am specifically baiting liberals and I know exactly which line they are going to scream blue murder about."
Coulter is most proud of her recent televised confrontation with Katie Couric, the attractive, cancer-surviving presenter of NBC's Today programme. Also a blonde, Couric is thought by many to be the embodiment of wholesome American virtue - a sort of souped-up Judy Finnegan.
On the contrary, said Coulter in her book, Couric was a dangerous subversive - she was the "affable Eva Braun" of American morning television.
"In retrospect, that phrase was a one-punch knockout," says Coulter, proudly. "I think that a lot of people really hate her and I was just the first one to pop her."
Coulter had been booked on Today well before Slander was published and Couric had no option but to go ahead with the interview.
"It was totally great," Coulter says. "I loved it. She's very friendly, very perky and that's why it makes a difference that she's engaging in this systematic Left-wing propaganda. It totally captured the imagination of all the media. Everybody loves a catfight."
By common consent, Coulter was judged the winner. Couric was exposed as having erroneously quoted Ronald Reagan's official biographer as calling the former president an "airhead".
Off-air, Coulter also skewered her for having suggested that Republicans were responsible for encouraging the murder of a black man in Texas who was tied to a truck and dragged to death. "Katie's defence of that was that many people were saying that, and I said, this is always how liberals inject their personal opinions."
In Slander, Coulter details how conservatives are routinely portrayed as Nazis by liberals, while Republican presidents and vice-presidents from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle and George W Bush are characterised as stupid.
Perhaps, I venture tentatively, liberals might be wrong but not disingenuous. "They're not well-meaning," she says, sternly. "I'm sick of that infernal nonsense about liberals being well meaning but misguided. They're traitors. I don't generally call them stupid. I call the stupid ones stupid. I call the drunks drunk. I'm not pretending to deliver objective news."
Coulter is upset that John Walker Lindh, the young Californian who fought for the Taliban, has struck a deal that allows him to plead guilty in return for a 20-year sentence.
"Oh, the poor little darling," she says, sarcasm dripping from her lips. "He's a traitor. I certainly would have liked to have seen a trial and I would have liked the death penalty. He's the typical product of a liberal upbringing. They should almost forget punishing him, and his parents could get the death penalty."
All this is cheerfully delivered at top volume and some of the diners are beginning to stare. The man at the next table leans over and says: "I think you're great, because you have no soft edges and you never pull your punches."
He then explains how he "came out" as a conservative in San Francisco a few years ago and thereby accepted that this meant he would never climb the corporate ladder in his architecture firm.
Coulter squeals with delight. "This happens to me all of the time in New York and LA. That is the great thing about being a publicly identified Right-winger. It used to be a case of meeting at a cocktail party or whatever and there was always this dance conservatives would do around each other because it's axiomatic that every cultured person is a liberal.
"So each person would get slightly more Right-wing with each statement and it takes, like, 45 minutes for both of you to figure out you can talk honestly. Now I go to a cocktail party and any Right-winger in the room will make a beeline and just start unloading."
An air of mystery surrounds Coulter's age. She says she is 38 but her publicist puts her at 40. After the interview, she sends me an email: "I think you should go with one of the incorrect younger ages."
At the moment, she is without a boyfriend; curiously, her last beau happened to be a Muslim. "The relationship was complicated by his interest in committing jihad," she jokes. "I took away his box cutters. At first, I thought he was a terrorist. I just kept on running into this handsome Muslim on the street. He was a fan of mine."
So was he stalking her? "He was, but he was a good-looking stalker. I'd been so looking for one of those."
Coulter is still searching for Mr Right-Wing. "I've been engaged many times. Four, I think. But I'm not like every other American. I thought I'd meet the right person before getting married and having children."
Who were these dumped fiancés? "Oh, I don't even remember all of them. I really don't think about exes five minutes after they've gone."
She loves New York, because it's "full of single people in their thirties", and accepts the relative absence of Right-wingers. "I must live among them so I can observe liberals in their natural environment. I can catch them saying things when they're off guard and don't think anyone's listening.
"I have the most perfect life imaginable. I sleep till noon. I work in my underwear. I've got no bosses. No one can fire me. I write about whatever I want to write about. I'm happy all the time. Americans like me - real Americans."
Has she ever had a liberal thought? "Oh gosh, I hope not." What about gay rights? "Oh, I think they'll burn in hell. Which is very comforting, by the way, to my gay friends - of which there are many."
Premarital sex? "Well, OK, I'm sort of joking about burning in hell. Well, I'm not entirely joking. I will never say publicly that, as a Christian, I think God says it's OK to have premarital sex or to have homosexual sex.
"You know, that is why Christians are the most tolerant people in the world - because we know there's original sin. We know people do bad things. But it seems to me it's a much worse thing to go around saying that it isn't a sin to commit a sin. I mean - at least feel guilty about it."
Coulter is disappointed by the poor quality of her hate mail. "Some letters say, 'You're ugly'. Or it will be, 'You're only on television because you're pretty.' Liberals can't even get their slanders straight. What is it? Am I pretty or ugly?"
This is a woman who likes being loved but loves to be hated. "Most of the time, I just think of Chairman Mao's saying that it's a good thing to be attacked by the enemy. The more vicious they are, the happier I am."
"Yeah, baby, YEAH!!!"
He obviously has not checked out the Free Republic and other pro-Coulter websites.
Since when is Katie Couric a "cancer-survivor"??
I think the reference is to her husband, who died of colon cancer a few years ago.
Sounds like a plan to me. 
I'll love to be her midnight snack!
Militia crowd defined as anybody to the right of Neville Chamberlain, who if around today, would be cheerily jetting off to apologize for buildings getting in the way of Muslim hijackers in a hurry.
i stopped reading at this point. No point in going further when the author is so obviously clueless.
...say it's not so! The left is so biased that they don't even know when they are proving the point.
I've learned to bleep that stuff out. Strain out the leftist dross, read the witty and revealing stuff Ann says in the interview and Ann'll come off better than ever to you.
This is such an endearing trait. I love that about her.
:o)
Anyway, I noticed that Katie was in her perkiest outfit with her killer shoes on. Ann's did have her diva shoes on as well that day. Not only did Ann crush Katie verbaly, she is way better looking. Katie was tripping on her words and trying so hard to hide her smugness. Ann is a goddess in my mind. I wish I had her shoes!!!
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