Ann Coulter has gone mad, mad I tell you

August points to this article by Richard Cohen:

I am happy to report that Ann Coulter has lost her mind. The evidence for this is her most recent book, "Treason," a nearly unreadable slog through every silly thing anyone on the left has ever said. Coulter conflates dissent with treason, opposition with treason, being wrong with treason, being right with treason and just about anything she doesn't like with treason. If the book were a Rorschach test, she would be institutionalized.

My glee in reporting that Coulter is daft is predicated on the prediction that her book, like her previous one, will be a bestseller. This is invariably the case with rants from the right. They tell the majority (non-liberals) that they are being controlled by the minority (liberals) -- and that most of the country's important institutions, particularly the press, are in the hands of leftists. Coulter has now taken this argument one step further. This wee minority is not merely wrong. It is traitorous.

She says the New York Times "issues traitorous editorials." She says, "Liberals relentlessly attack their own country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are." "Free speech," which those canny liberals often cite to justify their wacko ideas, "is a one-way ratchet for traitors," and "liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason." The book is a hoot.

It is also good news for liberals. It suggests that the right, at least the hard right, has finally dumbed out. This is the predictable cycle for all movements. They start with a genuine grievance and proceed from there to the totally ridiculous -- or, in some cases, to the downright macabre.

In some ways, the nutso American brand of archconservatism mirrors traditional anti-Semitism. Jew-haters proclaim that Jews control the media, international finance and almost everything else of importance -- but, somehow, Jews have accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally, the mass murder of the Holocaust. It is the same with American liberals. They control everything, and yet, somehow, the White House, both houses of Congress and, with the exception of several delis in New York, the entire business community are in the hands of conservatives. It's hard to figure.

There's more, oh how there's more. Feel free to read the rest.

You know, I've often wondered how Coulter could even possibly attain her level of popularity. She's a former constitutional lawyer who seems to to nothing about constitutional law. Her writing is sporadic, and she very rarely can maintain a single editorial point for more than a sentence or two if even that. And, as Cohen so eloquently puts it, she's completely insane. I mean, hell, if I wanted crazy, uber-right, blind unthinking accusations, I'd read Mein Kampf. At least Hitler had a sense of prose.