Ms. Right. great read...FOR EVERYBODY!

[Brwn_eyes0511]

.........People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh. Consider an exchange on Fox News in June 2001 with Peter Fenn, a Democratic strategist. At the time, Barbra Streisand had suggested that Californians practice more conservation, to which Coulter responded:

COULTER: God gave us the earth.
FENN: Oh, O.K.

COULTER: We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas.

FENN: Oh, this is a great idea.

COULTER: God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'

FENN: Oh, terrific. We're Americans, so we should consume as much of the earth's resources--

COULTER: Yes. Yes!

FENN: —as fast as we possibly can.

COULTER: As opposed to living like the Indians.

Coulter and Fenn were both laughing. But her rape-the-planet bit would later be wrenched from context and repeatedly quoted as Coulter nuttiness. "What p_____ me off," Coulter says, "is when they don't get the punch line."

But it's possible to get the punch line and not laugh. Last year Coulter wrote a column in which she joked, "Like many of you, I carefully reviewed the lawsuits [alleging bias] against the airlines in order to determine which airlines had engaged in the most egregious discrimination, so I could fly only those airlines ...

Imagine the great slogans the airlines could use: "'Now Frisking All Arabs—Twice!' ...

"'You Are Now Free to Move About the Cabin—Not So Fast, Mohammed!'" But that's not (or not only) a joke. Coulter actually favors discrimination based on skin color in airports. She argues that airports should establish a separate line for men and boys whose complexion suggests they could be from the Middle East; they would be screened more thoroughly than other passengers.

"Basically," she says breezily, "aged 15 to 45—12 to 45, say.

Swarthy men ... We'd be searching, you know, Italians, Spanish, Jews, males—but you're excluding the women. You're excluding the old people. You're excluding American blacks."

"Didn't we throw out discrimination based on skin color a long time ago?" I ask.

"This is just safety, and I wouldn't do it for drug dealing," she says. "I wouldn't do it for speeding. I wouldn't do it for a normal crime. It's a serious issue, but it is insane what is going on in the airports right now." Coulter's friends had told me that nothing angers her quite like standing in an airport security line. (She travels frequently to give speeches at $25,000 a pop—up to $50,000 if she must cross the Mississippi River.) Conveniently, her plan would let her glide through a metal detector the pre-9/11 way (shoes on, dignity intact).

Coulter says profiling makes sense when Muslims have committed virtually all the terrorist attacks against Americans for the past 25 years—she begins a terrorism timeline in her latest book with Iranian militants taking Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979. She says of Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City, Okla., "One does not a pattern make." And why wouldn't al-Qaeda recruit white or black Americans? "It's harder than it sounds. You're increasing the transaction costs."

It would be easier to accept Coulter's reasoning if a shadow of bigotry didn't attach to many of her statements about Arabs and Muslims. At the reception after her CPAC speech, she mocked some of the more ornate claims of torture from suspected terrorists detained by the U.S.: "It's completely insane stuff. 'The government flew me to Las Vegas and made me have sex with a horse,'" she said to laughter. But then she added with a grin, "Liberals are about to become the last people to figure out that Arabs lie." How did such a flagrantly impolitic person become such a force in our politics?

Ann Hart Coulter was born in New York City on dec. 8, 1961. (That's according to her Connecticut voter registration. Coulter says she won't confirm the date "for privacy reasons"—she's had several stalkers. "And I'm a girl," she adds.) Her father John, 77, was a G.I. Bill student who became an FBI agent and then a corporate lawyer; Nell Martin, who raised Ann and two boys, is the daughter of a Paducah printmaker. Coulter learned to argue around a dinner table populated by a Catholic father, a Presbyterian mother and two brothers—one of them "a Presbyterian and an anti-Papist," Coulter says with a titter, and the other a Catholic. "And I'm like Hillary with the Mets and the Yankees—I root for both."

The Coulter family argy-bargy was friendly but intense, and formative. "For a younger girl with two older brothers, you've got to learn to mix it up, stand up for yourself," says Merrill Kinstler, 41, a stock trader and close friend. "Older brothers are not going to cut you any slack. If you say something stupid, you figure, next time, I'm going to be better at it." Kinstler, an ex-Democrat who speaks with Coulter virtually every day, describes her as "a cat who thinks she's a dog. She's very much a woman, but she likes ... mixing it up in what I think is a very guy way. Let's put it this way. I have never heard from her, and I know I never will, the following two words: I'm offended."

Indeed, Coulter can be almost as acerbic with herself and her family as she is with liberals. "Because I'm a cranky conservative," Coulter has written, "the world simply reinforces my prejudices on a daily basis." Even her dear mother isn't exempt from her raillery. Last year Nell Coulter learned she had ovarian cancer. She underwent surgery last fall and has had regular chemotherapy this year. She says Ann has taken her to every appointment and remembered every detail for the doctors. But it's not Ann's nature to sound weepy; among her greatest fears—boredom, irrelevance, getting caught on a plane without a nicotine patch—is sentimentalism. For weeks, as we talked for this story, she wouldn't go on the record about her mom's cancer—she half-jokingly said any humanizing detail might slow attacks from liberals, which help sell books. When she finally relented and said I could call her mother, she matter-of-factly told me to do so before the following Wednesday. "She gets the chemo on Wednesday, and once the chemo sets in"—Coulter began to laugh--"for the first week, she gets a little daft from the chemo ... Whenever I call them [her parents], it rings. It rings. It rings. The phone picks up. 'Wait a minute. I have to take my hearing aid out.' 'Find the phone that works.' It's pandemonium calling old people!" Coulter often speaks with great affection for her parents, and she said this with a light, you-know-how-it-is tone. But there's no mistaking: this is a person who will say anything, even when the camera is off.

Coulter got on the honor roll as a kid, fenced and played lacrosse, went to Ramones and Grateful Dead shows (dozens of Dead shows—drug free, she claims). She grew up in a Reagan household and began to explore conservatism on her own at Cornell. There she discovered both liberals, who made her more conservative, and feckless conservatives in the "cigar-smoking, martini-drinking, oh-I-get-drunk-all-the-time libertarian mode," who made her more socially conservative. But there was a twist. In 1984, in an article for the conservative Cornell Review, Coulter attacked its editor for writing, "Statistics are like bikinis: what they show is important, but what they conceal is vital." "The message is clear," Coulter responded in her article.

"The vital parts are the breasts and the vagina, so go get her." I was surprised to find that the piece made a standard feminist argument against pornography (an "atrocity" in which women are "exploited" and "dehumanized"). Its opening lines are: "Conservatives have a difficult time with women. For that matter, all men do."

Coulter—who likes to shock reporters by wondering aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to vote—howls at the idea that she was a college feminist. But even today, she can write about gender issues with particular sensitivity. In 2002, after Halle Berry won her Oscar, Coulter said in her column, "Berry's unseemly enthusiasm for displaying 'these babies,' as she genteelly refers to her breasts, reduces the number of roles for any women who lack Berry's beauty-queen features."

And of course the biggest case Coulter ever helped handle as an attorney (she got her law degree from the University of Michigan in 1988) was a sexual-harassment claim of an unsophisticated woman against her powerful former boss. Coulter was one of a handful of informal legal advisers quietly helping Paula Jones, who had alleged in a 1994 lawsuit that she suffered distress and retaliation at her state job after refusing Arkansas Governor Clinton's request for oral sex in 1991. Coulter interviewed Jones and helped write her legal briefs.

Meanwhile, Coulter had emerged as a star in the 24-hour news culture that flowered in the mid-'90s. In 1995, giddy after Republicans took Congress for the first time in 40 years, she had moved from an anonymous corporate-law job in Manhattan to the Washington office of a freshman Republican Senator, Spencer Abraham. Flirty and quick-witted and fun—ex-conservative David Brock says in his book Blinded by the Right that "Ann seemed to live on nothing but chardonnay and cigarettes"—Coulter charmed both Democrats and Republicans. She already knew (or had dated) many young conservatives in college and law school, and just 10 weeks after she arrived in Washington, National Journal named her one of its conservatives under 40 who were "likely to have an impact."........