The Far Right's Pinup Fascist

With a television face and a politician's instincts, Ms. Coulter has made a career out of career-ending statements.

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," she wrote of Muslims on the National Review Web site after Sept. 11 in a column that prompted her departure.

"Treason" is no less inflammatory. In it, Ms. Coulter reaches back into history to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the ultimate tar baby of American politics, and hugs him like a teddy bear. Senator McCarthy, she has come to believe, is a misunderstood patriot who saved the country from itself.

The unvarnished id of American conservatism, Ms. Coulter has long been a target of anyone to the left of Patrick J. Buchanan, but the wholesale indictment in "Treason" of Democrats as traitors has drawn withering fire even from fellow outriders on the right. David Horowitz, a Coulter ally who picked up her column for FrontPageMagazine.com after it was dumped by the National Review Online, assailed the book on his site, saying it "compromised her case and undermined her attempt to correct a record that desperately needs correction." Writing in The Sunday Times of London, Andrew Sullivan suggested that she "plays directly into the hands of the left by defending the tactics of Joe McCarthy." And Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal suggested, "The senator — who knew something about the art of outrage merchandising — would have understood the latest of his public advocates."

David Brock, a former friend and recovering conservative, said a profession of inimical opinions leads to "an inflated view of self, alongside a secret or not-so-secret desire to invite scorn and persecution."

"I think that she has made a mistake with this book," he added. "Where do you go next? Holocaust denier? Slavery defender?"

I think I once called her the young Nazi's den mother. Note this article in the New York Times doesn't mention that shortly after 9/11 she suggested someone do the same to the New York Times. - EL