Nothing's gonna stop America's Sweetheart from stinking up the bestseller list...

I see that Ann Coulter has a new book coming out. I’m sure this will provoke much excitement among a certain subspecies of right-winger. You know, the sort who mistake cheap invective for passion and obnoxious posturing for actual argument. There are enough of that sort to make her a very rich woman, but anyone not invested in her act probably just wonders what all the fuss is about. Those people would rather read something entertaining, not just another canned rant. Anger’s appeal is often overestimated by people with a finger in the rhetoric game, be they right or left. It’s weird that people enjoy her tripe, yes, but it’s equally weird that liberals like me waste any time on her at all.

In a perfect word, we’d see her ravings for what they are–contrived, “provocative” bullshit that can only drag our national discourse deeper into the sewer. But we don’t live in a perfect world. So, in the spirt of the conservative spite goddess, I humbly offer the following list:

Seven Things Slightly More Torturous Than Reading Ann Coulter:

1) Filling my bathtub with mayonnaise, squirting a couple bottles of ketchup on top, diving in and not getting out until I’ve licked up every fatty, repulsive gob of it.

2) Going to work dressed only in a foxskin loincloth and then, when someone asks me why I’m dressed only in a foxskin loincloth, bellowing out “Because I’m the Manimal! The Manimal, goddamn you!” And that’s when I bit the head off a live gopher.

3) Sleeping in the same bed as Joe and Hadassah Leiberman. For fifteen solid months.

4) Traveling to the lawless region on the Afghani-Pakistan frontier and telling everyone I meet that, on the direct orders of Donald Rumsfeld, I have been sent to give this Osama Bin Laden fellow a sound thrashing.

5) The prostitutes of St. Paul, a bucket of Crisco, and me walking funny for three weeks. You put it together.

6) Seeing Ann Coulter without her clothes on.

7) Drinking from a dozen used condoms in an attempt to determine, by taste alone, which one has just been used by freakish man-goblin and American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken.