ABSOLUTELY CREDULOUS! Who in the world could ever believe Ann Coulter's kooky conclusions?

FATHER COUGHLIN HAD A LIVELY STYLE, TOO: There are many ways to be cast as the chump when you look up an Ann Coulter footnote. Sometimes, as on her book’s final page, her stated fact is utterly false (TDH, 7/23). Sometimes, as on her book’s page two, she has grossly misstated an interview session (7/11). Sometimes you end up with Muppet reviews (7/22). Sometimes she says that Phyllis Schlafly was “preposterously demeaned,” and the article she cites is a puff piece (7/22).

Yep, there’s a whole lot of chump change in Ann Coulter’s book. But the factual “errors” which litter this book are only one part of the problem. Perhaps as striking as the factual “errors” are the conclusions she draws from her “facts.” On her final page, Coulter baldly misstates a basic fact, saying that the New York Times kissed off the death of Dale Earnhardt. But even if the Times had put Earnhardt on page twenty-three, how in the world would that lead a sane person to a cuckoo-land statement like this one?

COULTER (page 205): Except for occasional exotic safaris to the Wal-Mart or forays into enemy territory, liberals do not know any conservatives. It makes it easier to demonize them that way. It’s well and good for Andrew Sullivan to talk about a “truce.” But conservatives aren’t the ones who need to be jolted into the discovery that the “bogeymen” of their imagination are “not quite as terrifying as they thought.” Conservatives already know that people they disagree with politically can be “charming.” Also savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans and lie for sport.
Coulter, of course, has just lied in our faces, misstating the NYT’s coverage of Earnhardt. But even if the Times hadn’t put his death on page one, how in the world would that lead to the thought that “liberals” are “savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans?” Coulter, of course, takes 27 bucks from those same normal people, then lies in their faces on page after page. But who could get from Coulter’s “fact” to the nasty, odd judgment she offers?
But Coulter’s book is full of such statements—sweeping expressions of typological thinking rarely seen in the last fifty years. Here, for example, is what she writes on her penultimate page, 204:

COULTER (page 204): This isn’t merely to say that liberals have near-exclusive control over all major sources of information in this country, though that is true. Nor is the point that liberals are narrow-minded and parochial, incapable of seeing the other fellow’s point of view, though that is also true. And it’s not that, as a consequence, liberals impute inhumanity to their political opponents and are unfathomably hateful and vicious. That’s true, too.
Such demonistic images—and such bizarre, sweeping judgments—drive this book from beginning to end. Here is an early example:
COULTER (page 6): Liberals hate America, they hate “flag-wavers,” they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam (post 9/11). Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They don’t have that much energy. If they had that much energy, they’d have indoor plumbing by now.
This produced the best question Coulter has yet been asked in her interview sessions on Slander. On Hardball, Mike Barnicle read that page 6 quote, and then posed a sane person’s question:
BARNICLE: Ann, I love you. You’re never boring, and I understand the point that you’re trying to make in this book, but aren’t you afraid—and I know you’re going to say that it’s, you know, a vast generalization, the quote I just read from—but aren’t you afraid that stuff like that makes you and your argument sound like a complete nut case?