Princess of the Stiletto-Cons

The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is: Conservatives believe man was created in God's image, liberals believe they are God. All their other behavioral tics stem from this one irreducible minimum. Liberals believe they can murder the unborn because they are gods. They try to forcibly create ‘equality' through affirmative action and wealth distribution because they are gods. They can lie, with no higher power to constrain them, because they are gods. They adore pornography and the mechanism of sex because man is just an animal and they are gods. They revere the U.N. and not the U.S. because they aren't Americans – they are gods.”

Thus wrote Ann Coulter in her recent book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. Later, she supports her point with retail humor, quoting neo-con Irving Kristol: “A liberal is a person who sees a 14-year-old girl performing live sex acts on stage and wonders if she's being paid the minimum wage.” She wraps the entire book with the pronouncement: “The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason.”

Hyperbole is Ann Coulter's business, and, as with many conservatives, money is the ultimate validation. Extremism has placed her in the forefront of gladiatorial TV pundits and moved a mess of her books out of Barnes & Noble. When faced with the prospect of meeting and talking to this woman who judges Bill Clinton's sex life as the criminal equal of 9/11, I take consolation in another pronouncement from Treason: “... they [liberals] instinctively root for anarchy and against civilization.”

More sympathetic to anarchy than liberalism, and not over-impressed with civilization as we know it, I have few illusions about where I will stand in her estimation. About the only thing Coulter and I have in common is admitting to sleeping past noon and writing in our underwear. Friends ask me why I should want to interview or even give space to someone like her. I can only reply, “What the hell? I'm tired of facing the enemy to find that he is us. Let's for once meet with an enemy and find that he is her.”

To ease into Coulter, I have arranged to watch her live on the set of the TV show Real Time with Bill Maher, because, I contend, that's her home turf. She's billed on the jacket of Treason as a “best-selling author” and “constitutional attorney,” named by Federal Judge Richard Posner as “one of the top 100 public intellectuals,” and later confides to me, “I think my TV performances, radio, books, columns, private conversations are all one. The same person, saying the same things, making the same points.”

But, to me, in a world where everything emanates from the tube, she is primarily a television phenomenon, a product of cable TV, the 24-hour news channels, all the way back to ramshackle debates on the old Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central, when Lemmy from Motorhead might be a featured guest. Is this what Posner meant by a “public intellectual”?

At first she was anonymous, an equine face in an angry gang of irritating, near-fascist young women with short skirts and web columns who described themselves as “pollsters” or “Republican strategists.” Mentally dubbing them “right-wing harpies,” I entertained a theory that they were grown in tanks at a hidden installation just outside Stepford, then instructed in shrill interruption and an unwavering hatred of all things Clinton at secret training camps in darkest Connecticut. I rather hoped these babes-of-the-right – sexy by Washington standards, but decrying sex out of wedlock – would never acquire names, but remain in my mind as just the blonde one, the black one, and the born-again Christian, who claimed still to be a virgin in her mid-20s.

Then George W. Bush took the White House. All political debate ran off and joined the circus, and a circus needs its dancing girls. Despite myself, I learned their names: Kellyanne Conway, Tara Setmeyer, Kim Serafin. But the clear winner of the Hanna Reich Alpha-Absolutist Award was the tall one with the long legs and very long blonde hair called Ann Coulter.

A Certain Need to Dominate

On my way in to the CBS campus at Beverly and Fairfax, where HBO shoots Real Time, I checked with the security guard that all was cool. He nodded. “You're with Ann Coulter, right?”

The words sounded just a touch eerie. “Uh, right.”

My hopes had been high for this edition of Real Time. An HBO press release had touted it as a grudge match between Coulter and Arianna Huffington, who had just declared her gubernatorial intentions. As it turned out, Huffington's candidacy had elevated her to a solo slot, leaving Coulter – in white capri pants and a tight, white, long-sleeved T-shirt – trading polite repartee with Orange County's surfing Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher and comic Orlando Jones. The result was tepid, but, when we finally meet, Coulter is unconcerned. “I said to my friend that I really liked Friday's show,” she says. “The comedian got in with his jokes, which were good, and the congressman couldn't say much because he's a congressman. I like it with two quiet guests, because I get to dominate.” Á

Research indicates the need to dominate has played a major role in Coulter's background. She grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her father was a union-busting lawyer for the mighty Phelps Dodge mining company. Her mother was a Daughter of the American Revolution, and Ann herself joined the DAR when of age. In a recent Elle profile, her brother Jim is quoted: “At family dinners, we'd get into knock-down-drag-out fights about politics and religion. People would leave the table.”

Studying law at Cornell University, early in the Gordon Gecko 1980s, she earned her rep as a “stiletto conservative” by dominating at the right-wing campus paper, Cornell Review. After Cornell, she saw her mission: “If things are going to change, then people like me are needed in Washington.” She worked for Sen. Spencer Abraham, founder of the Federalist Society, a conservative law group, but showbiz came upon her in the mid-1990s, when the newly launched MSNBC needed a right-wing female commentator.

After poor Monica Lewinsky's White House blow job became public domain, Coulter teamed with other young stiletto-cons (including Matt Drudge) who saw a chance to actually take down Bill Clinton in a media-fueled coup d'etat. What better cause for a blonde political dominant than the breaking of the President? She joined the Paula Jones defense team. Perhaps her abiding hatred of the Clintons stems from Bill serving out his second term, despite her efforts, while Paula Jones wound up on Fox Celebrity Boxing fighting Tonya Harding.

Domination on Real Time comes in the form of her oft-repeated current catchphrase: “drain of the malarial swamps in the Middle East.” This is a softened version of the post-9/11 pronouncement – “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” – that caused the National Review to drop her magazine column. She lauds GWB's courage to fly fighter jets during the Vietnam War, even if it was only over Texas, and she offers a prepared-sounding routine about how sex among married conservatives is better than the orgasms of loveless liberals.

“There is a study ... ,” she repeats over and over. But my own thoughts are of another recent study, “Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” published in Psychological Bulletin (and reported in “Please Tell Me You Made This Up,” CityBeat No. 11), which concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity … desiring a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality.”

McCarthyism Revised

So, is Coulter really a psycho? Part of my mission is to find out – and maybe also divine how much of her vitriolic act is career-serving shtick. At times, she sounds like a political standup, except she has failed to crack the old Sam Kinison secret that, in order to make psychotic pronouncements funny, the artist has to reveal a measure of her own psychosis.

The following week, we meet at LA Farm restaurant on Beverly Drive, close to where Coulter is staying, in the flatlands of Beverly Hills. When I arrive, she is being photographed by CityBeat. She seems to enjoy this. A fan is fawning. We move to a sidewalk table, and she presents me with a copy of her book. I tell her I already have one. (Did she seriously imagine I'd turn up without reading Treason?) I feel a friendly warning is in order and tell her, “I pretty much disagree with everything in the book.”

Coulter laughs and gives the spare to the astonished fan. We start with small talk – the California recall. These are the early days. Bill Simon is still in the race. I ask for her take on Candidate Arnold and find she has yet to formulate an opinion. Like Arnold himself, she seems to be looking into it. Being anti-abortion has always been one of Coulter's areas of non-negotiation, but she appears to be giving Arnold a pass.

“I'm not happy with the Warren Buffet thing.” She pushes back the trademark hair. “He's a big tax-raiser, and he's pro-abortion. He buys the equipment to perform the abortions.”

I light a cigarette. “Arnold himself claims to be pro-choice.”

Surprisingly, she shrugs this off. “There's not much a governor can do about abortion.” (A few days later, she is on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, and her positioned has hardened. She no longer talks up Tom McClintock and appears to have more or less joined the Arnold camp, seemingly drawn by the moth-attraction of crude star power. But the recall is not why we're at this sidewalk table.)

Ann Coulter has repeatedly decried the coarsening of contemporary culture, something she blames on liberals, gay marriage, and Howard Stern, if I can piece together her varied pronouncements. Is she concerned about perhaps being a contributing factor herself? To ease into the subject, I recall a time, a quarter of a century earlier, when TV political comment was a gentlemanly affair between William F. Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith, rather than inflexible ideologues screaming overtop each other.

She pounces on a word. (She is, after all, a lawyer.) “I don't think I scream,” she barks. “I think that is sexist.”

“Okay, shouting at each other.”

“I don't shout,” she says. “TiVo my performances.”

“So, how would you describe what you do?”

“I don't sit down, shut up, and be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen the way liberal men would like, and when they hear a woman with an opinion, they say I'm shouting, but I do not shout.”

There has to be more. She almost pouts. “A lot of people are shouting at me,” she adds.

Surely, to be shouted at must go with the territory after producing a book like Treason? The book's starting point is the Venona cables, handily nutshelled by the PBS program Nova: “In 1995, the U.S. National Security Agency broke a half century of silence by releasing translations of Soviet diplomatic cables decrypted back in the 1940s. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of the KGB. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union. By cracking the code, the FBI was able to hunt down ‘atom spies' such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg.”

Since 1995, the right has greeted these revelations with unseemly but understandable glee, indicating as they do that Joe McCarthy and the commie hunters of the 1950s may have been right, whether they knew it or not. Useful Idiots

Coulter might have further tortured the liberals with a retelling of how one of their favorite domestic atrocities – McCarthyism – turned out to have a measure of validation. (The story of the decrypted Venona cables is fully told in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John E. Haynes and Harvey Klehr.) But, instead, in Treason, she uses Venona merely as the launch pad for an epic flight of advanced extremism. McCarthy was right, she argues, and his methods were justified because liberals in general and the Democratic Party in particular are all but agents of foreign enemies, and have been for the last 60 or more years, and the ones who aren't are “just useful idiots – just stupid.” Truman was a dupe, Kennedy was a coward, Jimmy Carter was a bigger coward, and if the American people had elected Barry Goldwater in 1964, instead of the corrupt and incompetent Lyndon Johnson, Goldwater would have ended the Vietnam War in about a week by first issuing a warning and then nuking Hanoi. In her book, Bill Clinton appears as little short of the Antichrist, and the rehabilitation of McCarthy becomes an equally stirring defense of Ken Starr.

In the face of this thrill-ride overkill, I might argue that, at the end of World War II, the USSR, though still a U.S. ally, would have been crazy not to explore every possible intelligence asset while the CIA was importing the best and brightest of the Gestapo and the SS in preparation for the Cold War. Moving up the Treason timeline, I might question her statement, “the Cuban Missile Crisis was a humiliating defeat for the United States” and recount how, as a worried teenager who did not want to be flash-fried with his life still in front of him, I saw it as a mighty triumph for humanity when Jack Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had the courage and subtlety to avert a thermonuclear global holocaust. Like many, I wonder about the CIA's role in Vietnam, and also that of barking-mad generals like LeMay and Westmoreland.

I could counterpunch with hapless Republican adventures: Jeanne Kirkpatrick's death-squad policy in Central America; the Iran-Contra affair, with guns going south and cocaine going north; the Reagan CIA cozying up to the mujaheddin and a young Osama Bin Laden; or Don Rumsfeld doing the same with Saddam Hussein when Iran was America's most wanted. Or, should God come into the argument, I could even go back to St. Augustine's concept of the just war, and how the Emperor Constantine used Christianity to impose conformity on the Roman war machine.

But I don't.

That would only start a pointless tit for tat, with Coulter tossing her blonde mane and employing confirm-and-deny mannerisms, alternately shaking and nodding her head and then suddenly making eye contact as though I were a camera lens. I have formalized a strategy: not to play by her rules. This is print, not television, and I have the final cut. I will write the story as I see it. I can simply relax like a gentleman and let her talk, watching for insights into whatever abyss might be the source of her fury. Let the New York Observer's Joe Conason whine on Hardball that Coulter won't debate him. Me? I don't have to bother, but I do remind myself that she started out as a lawyer. In the middle of a diatribe about how liberals, rather than conservatives, are the true homophobes, J. Edgar Hoover is mentioned, and I can't resist a joke about the legendary cocktail-dress photographs. Again, she jumps.

“There were no photographs!” she says. “If they had photographs, I'd concede the point. And the idea that the most hated man in America could be going to drag-queen orgies at the Waldorf, without anyone in the press noticing until 20 years later, and he's dead and libel-proof. ‘Yeah, I saw him in a dress.' They could never produce any photographs. It's completely apocryphal.”

I fluff my memory. Did I really see the picture? And if I did, was it real or Photoshop? On the spot, I'm damned if I know. But now I'm falling into the trap, and will lose the thread of what I really want to know. In Treason, Coulter has put liberals on trial and presented a case to the jury. I wonder out loud, if she's found the liberals guilty, what do we have in store in the penalty phase?

She laughs, and then there is a long silence. I don't exactly expect her to smile and tell me we'll all be rounded up and incarcerated – or worse – but the eventual response is well below what I might expect. “The penalty should be the penalty of the ballot box,” she says.

Victim Mentality

I've been entertaining the idea that I'm dealing with an Elmer Gantry, a cynical and successful media opportunist making her way through the book and TV circus, and doing very well by going to extremes. But, at one point, she becomes very animated, as if she really believes she is the victim, threatened by a ruthless liberal elite.

“My enemies are accusing me of saying dissent is treason,” she bristles. “Of course I'm not saying that, but in point of fact, you know, there were massive antiwar protests across the country. The only dissent that anyone is trying to squelch here is my dissent from the proposition that liberals love their country. You can't say that. How dare you? Everyone is trying to intimidate me, and they've used the myth of McCarthyism, McCarthyism! McCarthyism … to prevent anyone from asking this question. Do liberals love their country? That's off-limits. That's the one thing you can't ask.

“I'm the one people are trying to silence,” she goes on. “Not the antiwar protesters. People burning the American flag, denouncing our war aims. Flying to Baghdad. They're invited on Fox News, even; they see O'Reilly, Hannity, and they're all saying, ‘You have a First Amendment right to dissent.' Well, so does David Duke. We don't slap him on the back. I want to start arguing about this again. They need a little tough love right now. I'm the one people are trying to silence, not antiwar protesters. It's a taboo to question them. They're like children who need discipline. So, I'm applying the tough love.”

I can only blink through a silence of my own. Ann Coulter is white, wealthy, and successful. She has her health, and she dines with people who at least advise those who rule the world. She has personally assisted in an attempt to bring down a president. If any woman is part of the elite, she is. And yet, when the hyperbole approaches outburst, I am almost convinced she truly thinks she's victimized.

And she has come to this victim conclusion while George W. Bush, to whom she demonstrates unwavering loyalty and who she places beyond criticism, has been riding high. As the guerrilla war drags on in Iraq, the deficits become unmanageable, and Bush may face being forced to ignominiously pull out or hand over control to the U.N., I don't like to speculate how Coulter and her kind will react. Fear tends to beget hate, and, at least for the moment, she has enough media access to communicate this hate to a public that is pretty damned confused already.

For conservatives, these have been the good times. If we traitors have our way, it will all be downhill from here, and I'll guarantee that the likes of Ann Coulter will descend with neither grace nor equanimity.