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MSNBC found Coulter "blunt, rude and just completely over the top," says Stephen Lewis, a former MSNBC producer involved in Coulter's hiring--and firing. The network dismissed her at least twice: first in February 1997, after she insulted the late Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to France, even as the network was covering her somber memorial service. Coulter said Harriman was one of those women who "used men to work their way up" and suggested "Sharon Stone or Madonna" as her replacement. Even so, the network missed Coulter's jousting and quickly rehired her.
Eight months later, Coulter's relationship with MSNBC ended permanently after she tangled with a disabled Vietnam veteran on the air. Robert Muller, co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, asserted that "in 90% of the cases that U.S. soldiers got blown up [in Vietnam]--Ann, are you listening?--they were our own mines." (Muller was misquoting a 1969 Pentagon report that found that 90% of the components used in enemy mines came from U.S. duds and refuse.) Coulter, who found Muller's statement laughable, averted her eyes and responded sarcastically: "No wonder you guys lost." It became an infamous--and oft-misreported--Coulter moment. The Washington Post and others turned the line into a more personal attack: "People like you caused us to lose that war."
But her troubles with MSNBC only freed her to appear on CNN and Fox News Channel, whose producers were often calling. In 1998, Coulter was one of the first pundits to argue forcefully that Clinton should be impeached; she helped lead the charge by writing High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, which became a best seller. When reporters asked David Schippers, the House Judiciary Committee's chief investigator, for a "road map" to the impeachment inquiry, he told them, "Read Ann Coulter's book."
After Coulter helped get the President impeached, one might have expected her to follow fellow anti-Clinton machinators--Linda Tripp and her friend Lucianne Goldberg come to mind--into obscurity. But Coulter's second book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, an assault on the media, spent eight weeks at the top of the Times best-seller list and rekindled the debate on whether reporters show a liberal bias. Slander was followed in 2003 by Treason, and by then Coulter had inspired an industry of debunkers, people who scour her every utterance for mistakes large and small. Entire websites were devoted to this purpose.
When I asked Coulter about her mistakes, she responded by e-mail: "I think I can save you some time ... The one error liberals have produced is that I was wrong when I said the NYT didn't mention Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page the day after his death. There have been novels and Broadway plays written about Ann Coulter's one mistake, which was pretty minor IMHO [in my humble opinion]--the Times article DID begin: 'His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.'"
Actually, it didn't. The article began, "Stock car racing's greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today ..." The article doesn't mention Wal-Mart, although a subsequent piece did.