Something that may surprise many readers of mine is that I am not a liberal. Not only that, but I tend to not get along with people who identify themselves as Liberal. Discussions of politics and economics are the fastest and most surefire way for my socialist (pinko!) boyfriend and me to start a screaming match. Perhaps knowing this will make it more understandable when I say that I have, until today, reserved judgment about Ann Coulter. Granted, all the Coulter snippets I have read lead me to believe she is a four-letter word referring to an area of female anatomy, but I try not to make up my mind about any political pundit until I have read at least one of their books; I think it's unfair to judge a person entirely by their sound bites.

However, today I read Coulter's latest book, Treason, and in retrospect I am glad I never used that four-letter word, because it would be an insult to all genuine four-letter-word people in the world. Ann Coulter isn't even worth insulting. According to pretty much everybody, Coulter is "the leading right-wing pundit" of our time, and if that's true then all I can say is: whoa, sucks to be the right-wing. The woman does nothing more than link various neo-con slogans together into a book-length production and then use her supposedly attractive picture on the cover to get people to pay money for the privilege of reading them. While I admire her ability to make money off the gullibility of the public, I really can't respect anything about her work. In my world you have to earn the status of a four-letter word by being a genuine pain in the ass, and you generally have to do so with flare and biting humor. As my friend Mike would put it, Coulter isn't funny "ha-ha", she's funny "uh-oh."

The first thing I noticed while reading Treason was that the three quotes used in the inner flap blurb were all from the first 5 pages of the book; this suggests that even the reviewers, who claimed the book was "even more controversial and prescient" than Coulter's break-out hit Slander, could not keep awake long enough to finish the second half of the first chapter. I know my eyelids started to sag when she accused liberals of "treating enemies like friends and friends like enemies." I guess nobody told Coulter about Bush's "you're with us or against us" speech or his alienation of our allies in the Middle East when he drew the borders of his Axis of Evil with an indiscriminate hand. She must be likewise unaware of that little Republican snafu called the Iran Contra affair, where our Republican administration financially supported a few of America's enemies. Her criticism of liberals for lifting trade sanctions is likewise snore-worthy, since Bush was the one who asked the UN to lift the sanctions against Iraq. Though I suppose that doesn't count any more, since we have accomplished our mission and nobody is dying in combat in Iraq any more, right?

As if all these snoozers weren't enough to leave you begging for the mercy of a quick death, Coulter even pouts about how liberals write nasty things about conservatives in the paper...clearly forgetting that she herself has a column that is pretty much dedicated to saying nasty things about liberals.

I did perk up long enough to laugh out loud when Coulter claimed that "liberals never wage war," however. I'm a little rusty on my history, but I am pretty sure it was Harry Truman, one of those loathsome Democrats, who was the only human being EVER to drop two atomic bombs on a foreign nation. Perhaps that doesn't qualify as warfare...?

There are, of course, the obligatory several chapters spent calling all liberals (or people who agree with liberals, ever) Communists. Coulter takes plenty of time explaining how Joe McCarthy was a true saint for defending America from the godless pinkos, and he has been smeared by an evil liberal conspiracy to doctor history books and vilify him. She re-writes a little history by claiming it was liberals who stopped McCarthy's crusade, when it was actually President Eisenhower who pushed to get the McCarthy hearings televised so the public could see Joe's tactics, and it was the Republican Senate that shut McCarthy down in the censure investigation. She also repeatedly states that the term "McCarthyism" is a made-up liberal buzzword, and "'McCarthyism' never existed," despite the fact that it was the title of McCarthy's own book.

One of the cutest parts of the entire book for me was when, I think in chapter 3, Coulter tries to support her view of history by saying that there is plenty of evidence for the Communist threat to America, thereby vindicating McCarthy and his tactics. The funny part is that said evidence consists of, in Coulter's words, "the detailed accounts given in sworn testimony by various ex-Communists...Chambers’s Pumpkin Papers...Soviet defectors who brought reams of KGB documents with them, identifying Soviet agents in America...There were confessions of arrested spies..." So after spending a chapter and a half talking about how horrid and immoral Communists are, Coulter rests her case entirely upon the word of--you guessed it--COMMUNISTS.

I dozed off and on through several more chapters on the godless Commie lefties, and I think she re-edited our history of the Vietnam War for a chapter or two as well. I won't bore you with more details, since it's pretty much all the same sort of material as I've already covered, except to share the final giggle of the whole story: Coulter concludes her little 14-chapter temper tantrum with the blithe assertion that "Liberals instinctively vote for anarchy and against civilization." I find that interesting, since she dedicated at least a full three chapters to accusing liberals of supporting totalitarianism (in the form of Communism). Very odd, this woman.

I was completely under whelmed by Miss Coulter, having expected more from the "foremost conservative pundit" than the same sort of blathering I heard from some of my classmates in freshman civics. Honestly, her book almost made me convert to liberalism, if only to distance myself as much as possible from such a shoddy writer; I certainly will never call myself a member of any party that can't come up with better than Coulter for a spokeswoman.