I got a heads up from John Hawkins of Right Wing News this morning that he was publishing another interview with Ann Coulter.

I was reminded how crazy you have to be to get into a battle of wits with this woman. Does she sit up and night and think of snappy comebacks and devastating observations or does it just come naturally? Its pretty scary either way.

There is a palpable fear in the mainstream media of having to interview Coulter, which is at least ever other year when the most recent book she writes predictably ends up a national best seller. Her appearance on the Tonight Show was in the realm of the bizarre. Leno looked like he was interviewing a cobra, except I've seen him look more relaxed with actual cobras. The guy did not wanna be there, and like so many other liberals looking cognitive dissonance in the eye, his interview technique was a pleading for Coulter to not slaughter his sacred cows.

What makes Coulter so "dangerous" compared to say, Jon Stewart, is that while Jon is amusing, his observations don't hold up to close scrutiny. Stewart feeds his audiences biases, which of course no one challenges. Coulter on the other hand is a comedy front end to some serious academic rigor. The expectation is that she is "so outrageous" that you can just dismiss her like you would, oh Kathy Griffin, but that's the rub--the more outrageous it sounds, the more money you can bet that its ground truth.

I recall when she wrote a column "claiming" that Max Cleland wasn't injured in combat (Cleland came back from Vietnam with three missing limbs...). Liberal pundits went bonkers. Cleland, a defeated Senator from Georgia, was being used as a prop by the John Kerry campaign to talk about the war in Iraq. Kerry claimed on several occasions that Cleland had lost his limbs in combat--sexing up the story and Cleland's credibility to criticize the Bush administration.

Amid angry insinuations that I "lied" about Sen. Max Cleland, I was attacked on the Senate floor by Sen. Jack Reed, Molly Ivins called my column "error-ridden," and Al Hunt called it a "lie." Joe Klein said I was the reason liberals were being hysterical about George Bush's National Guard service.

If you weren't familiar with Coulter, you may well have been shocked and appalled at her disrespect for a "war hero". Obviously lots of mainstream pundits took the bait and entered her kill zone.

It is simply a fact that Max Cleland was not injured by enemy fire in Vietnam. He was not in combat, he was not — as Al Hunt claimed — on a reconnaissance mission, and he was not in the battle of Khe Sanh, as many others have implied. He picked up an American grenade on a routine noncombat mission and the grenade exploded.

In Cleland's own words: "I didn't see any heroism in all that. It wasn't an act of heroism. I didn't know the grenade was live. It was an act of fate." That is why Cleland didn't win a Purple Heart, which is given to those wounded in combat. Liberals are not angry because I "lied"; they're angry because I told the truth.

A fuller account was given by FrontPage Magazine.

This terrible accident happened not on a battlefield but on a helicopter pad 15 miles away from combat. Cleland stepped out of a helicopter to go have a beer with buddies, saw a hand grenade on the ground, assumed that he had dropped it and picked the explosive device up. It had been dropped by another, inexperienced soldier who had left the weapon on a hair trigger setting. It detonated, devastating Cleland’s 25-year-old body and in an instant changing his life.

The one incident gives you an idea of the environment in which Ann Coulter wrote. Cleland himself is the source of the refutation, but the Kerry campaign, in collusion with the mainstream media, practically dared conservatives to unmask their lie on the premise that sympathy for a grievously injured veteran would allow them to simply condemn the observation as "unfeeling".

Coulter, as she always does, took the dare, and she was vilified. Yet the vilification others feared is a source of strength because ultimately and always, Coulter has the goods. Her books are meticulous sourced and footnoted. By comparison, a book by Joe Conason, which just happens to be an example of an entire class of books that Coulter derided as "liberal books with the word 'lie' in the title...", has sourcing that would embarrass a high school senior. I was astonished to follow references to opinion columns, other liberal books with the word 'lie' in the title, and various partisan website URLs. It amounted to, "George Bush is lying--Al Franken said so..."

The academic rigor serves her well because after you get pissed at her and fire up the browser to google some facts which with to refute her argument, its uh-oh time. That happens three or four times and the state media starts acting like Coulter is calling from collections.

In spite of having seven best-selling books and one of the most highly-recognizable names in the country, Coulter doesn't have a single inch of column space in any major newspaper aside from the conservative Human Events. Coulter has material prepared for that question too.

...the news industry is the only business where the customer is always wrong.

I suspect Coulter is going to prosper significantly over the next four years. Clinton was very, very good for Rush Limbaugh, and I expect Obama will be similarly profitable for Coulter. On the other hand, anyone wearing a bow-tie and expressing horror over the existence of Sarah Palin is in for some tough times.