Like the fictional Sex and the City heroine Carrie Bradshaw, the US author Ann Coulter (also a leggy blonde) likes to write at home dressed only in her underwear. But there all similarities end. While Bradshaw mused winsomely over finding love in her newspaper columns, Coulter produces a conveyor belt of right-wing invective aimed mainly at liberals but lately also at Muslims, whom she refers to variously as “ragheads”, “camel jockeys” and “jihad monkeys”.
Coulter, 44, who was raised in Connecticut in an upper middle-class family, is more than just an ultra-Conservative commentator; she is more than a “Republican Michael Moore”. She makes great effort to offend and says the only time she feels uneasy is when liberals are not attacking her.
Some choose not to take her seriously — a Time magazine article called her a right-wing Ali G — but others do. Her enemies have set up a website, anticoulter.com, with talking points such as: Coulter: Evil or Just Stupid?
But her motormouth is certainly a high earner. She commands thousands of dollars in speaking fees and her latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (her fifth bestseller) is set to top the New York Times bestseller list on June 25. In it she accuses four prominent widows of 9/11 victims of being “witches” profiting from the tragedy. This has caused an outcry. “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much,” she writes.
She graduated from Cornell University College in 1984, and received her degree from the University of Michigan Law School, where she often wore a fur coat to class, even in hot weather. During a televised exchange, she once told a disabled Vietnam veteran: “People like you caused us to lose that war.” Coulter once reflected that she was “emboldened by my looks to say things that Republican men wouldn’t”.
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Two days after the 9/11 attacks she wrote a notorious newspaper column in which she demanded: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” She advocates Muslim-free air travel, joking (or possibly not) that Muslims could “fly by magic carpet”.
Devout fans of Coulter could, if they wanted, purchase an action doll for $29.99 dressed in a black minidress which speaks Coulterisms such as: “Why not go to war just for oil?” Despite her vampish looks, however, Coulter is single, though she says she longs to settle down with the right man. The question is, is any male out there brave enough?