Reading Ann Coulter's latest book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and their Assault on America, one almost feels sorry for her. It's painfully clear she has crossed the threshold of her half life. Her mantra that liberals are pitiable, conniving, traitorous losers and that conservatives are valorous, patriotic administrative geniuses plays poorly against the backdrop of the hand-over from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Imagine penning a panegyric to dirigible travel while crossing the Atlantic on the Hindenburg.
The core of Coulter's thesis is that liberals get what they want by existing in a permanent state of victimhood. This is a rich theory for a woman who lives in that bizarre parallel universe where conservatives are eternally bedeviled and contained by that unholy trinity of the liberal media, academia and judiciary.
It becomes an even more difficult case to argue when you consider how, in its spectacular flame-out over the last year, the American right has suddenly discovered two liberal hobgoblins -- sexism and racism-- to explain away the laughable fizzling of its last two darlings, Sarah Palin and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
Coulter's case for liberal treachery is so weak that to bolster her arguments she is compelled to come to the defence of even more unsavoury characters, including disgraced congressman Tom DeLay, Mark Foley (who sent saucy messages to boy pages) and even the likes of preacher Ted Haggard, who, in spite of having hired a male prostitute, still doesn't believe in the existence of homosexuality.
It's a state of intellectual and moral bankruptcy that even Coulter must find embarrassing. But what choice does she have? She's no longer really part of the big-people debate.
In her mainstream appearances she's just going through the motions, scolding liberal operative Matt Lauer for interrupting her when his lips haven't even moved and being fawned over by the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, who also know they're the tyrannosaurs flailing their vestigial limbs in the new age of Obama.
