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Not long ago, I called Coulter's mother and read her one of her daughter's more rakish lines. Last year, after the New York Times published a Reagan obituary that mentioned the Iran-contra scandal 15 times, Coulter wrote that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is "a little weenie who can't read because he has 'dyslexia.'" "Oh, dear," said Nell Martin Coulter, 76, with a laugh.
"Now, is that the way little girls are brought up to speak in Connecticut?" I asked. Ann Coulter grew up in New Canaan, Conn.; her mother was raised in Paducah, Ky. "I know it's not the way little girls are brought up to talk in Kentucky."
"I think you've got a point there," Nell Coulter said, chuckling, "but that is the way she expresses herself, and she does have obviously strong likes and dislikes. That's just the way she puts things ... I think a person who has strong convictions is more convincing to someone who is wavering."
In other words, it's not an act. But as Coulter herself points out in Is It True What They Say About Ann?, "I think the way to convert people is to make them laugh or to make them enraged ... Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more liberal out there, I think I'd still write the way I write, because it gives me laughs." Coulter told me that when her editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, "I'll ask him, 'But is it funny?' And if he says it's funny, I'll cut an actual fact [instead]."
People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh. Consider an exchange on Fox News in June 2001 with Peter Fenn, a Democratic strategist. At the time, Barbra Streisand had suggested that Californians practice more conservation, to which Coulter responded:
COULTER: God gave us the earth.
FENN: Oh, O.K.
COULTER: We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas.
FENN: Oh, this is a great idea.
COULTER: God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'
FENN: Oh, terrific. We're Americans, so we should consume as much of the earth's resources--
COULTER: Yes. Yes!
FENN: --as fast as we possibly can.
COULTER: As opposed to living like the Indians.
Coulter and Fenn were both laughing. But her rape-the-planet bit would later be wrenched from context and repeatedly quoted as Coulter nuttiness. "What p_____ me off," Coulter says, "is when they don't get the punch line."
But it's possible to get the punch line and not laugh. Last year Coulter wrote a column in which she joked, "Like many of you, I carefully reviewed the lawsuits [alleging bias] against the airlines in order to determine which airlines had engaged in the most egregious discrimination, so I could fly only those airlines ... Imagine the great slogans the airlines could use:
"'Now Frisking All Arabs--Twice!' ...
"'You Are Now Free to Move About the Cabin--Not So Fast, Mohammed!'"