Although I’ve never met you in person, I’ve seen you on TV (after all, like all the other D.C. people you characterize so well, I watch TV constantly rather than socialize) and, not to put too fine a point on it, you make Calista Flockhart look like a grand-master sumo. I’ve had potato skins that are thicker than your biceps. I’ve dated a couple of really thin women in my day, and I assure you, it’s a major turn-off when their hipbones bruise you when you’re intimate together.

Which brings me to my second pearl of wisdom …

2) Eat some cake. Let us posit, in the hypothetical, that we were introduced by mutual friends, and I invited you to meet me for dinner. Where would we go, and what would we order? I like steak, chicken, pasta, pork chops, veal … meat. Potatoes. Beer. Mmmmm, beer.

You look like you survive on six pieces of sushi (no avocado) and an M&M per day.

If you were to go on a date with me, I would be twisted by guilt just from staring at your plate as you joylessly pushed some steamed spinach around with a fork. If we were to go out, you would be wise to …

3) Have a beer. Contrary to your paranoid fantasies, D.C. has some excellent late-night bars, many of them lovely Irish places like the 4 Provinces, Biddy Mulligans, the Dubliner, and a decent assortment of brew pubs. You need to drink a lot less wine spritzers and down some suds. The company in my bars is better and this will also help with your eating disor … I mean, weight problem.

Next, you should seriously consider …

4) Quit being white. It’s a common knock that Republicans don’t date much outside of their own prep schools, but you take this to a ridiculous extreme. You should rewrite your article and insert the word “white” in front of “Washington,” as in “boys in white Washington don’t know how …

You see, Ann, there’s a secret and mysterious world out there which is actually inside the Beltway, in fact inside the District. It’s called “The World Which is Not Northwest,” and it includes Southeast, Southwest, and Northeast. These are the three quadrants of D.C. which are occupied by the “black” and “brown” people who now comprise the overwhelming majority of Washington.

Ann, if Washington had the demographics that you ascribe to it, it would have two senators all its own, and a real live congressman who could vote. Because if it were white, Republicans would give a …

But I digress. The majority of the people in Washington aren’t white, they don’t work in Senate offices and they have excellent social lives. If you would like to view this spectacle in safety, I can arrange for a sealed vehicle to drive you to a mysterious and exotic place called Adams-Morgan, where people of color coexist peacefully with members of the “white” tribe … you could get a neat little tattoo while you’re up there.

Many of the men you might find attractive would undoubtedly be more interested in you if you could figure out a way to enjoy the wide and spicy melange that is D.C., instead of paying attention to the colored folks only to harangue them when they mess up your nails …

And speaking of haranguing people …

5) Stop being a mean bitch.

One of the things you hate about Washington is that complete strangers on the Metro ask you for your sports page. Ann, I frequently have out-of-town guests visit me in D.C. Because, as you have already established, I have to watch a lot of TV to see what’s going on in your neck of the woods, I often send these gentle strangers out onto the Metro alone. When I do, I pray, literally, that they won’t run into pompous, intolerant, judgmental, high-strung, anorexic clothes-horses like yourself if they should happen to get lost, require assistance, or even, God forfend, reach out across the aching void that divides us all and inquire if you’re finished with that section of the paper, ma’am?

A portion of the challenge that you face in your quest for tube steak, Ann, is that any decent guy who asks you out might someday face the vexing hypothetical question, What would it be like to have you run into his grandmother, were she to have the misfortune to need assistance on public transit and make the mistake of asking that nice white girl over there … ?

What I would really like to do next, Ann, is to give you a quick makeover. But to do that, you’ll have to …

6) Free your hair from that dominatrix hair stylist.

You look like you’ve got more armor on your hair than an M1-A1 tank has. What do you do, dip it into a bucket of floor wax and let it harden? I like a little mousse every now and then, but you are ridiculous. Did a piece of staging or one of those big lights fall on you the first time you walked into the studio? It’s like a safety helmet or something. George Clinton (he’s a man of color who has a band called Parliament and also plays with a group called The P-Funk All-Stars) once famously quipped, “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow.” I suggest instead that you turn your back on the Vidal Sassoon and …

7) Get a nice short cut.

I think you should try the tomboy look. You know how Trinity looks in “The Matrix”? I think that would be a good look on you. I love Sharon Stone’s current look. That and some wired-framed glasses, you know, the substitute-teacher look? As Homer says, “mmmm, slanty …”

Besides, you’re obviously not getting any action right now. What could it hurt? Also, I bet you would look good in jeans. As thin as you are, you’ve got to have a decent butt, so how ’bout showing it in something other than that dumb red dress of yours … (or is that Kelly Ann?)

And to improve your prospects with some of the Hi-Pro Glow, may I discreetly suggest …

Buy a vibrator.

In addition to all your other problems, I think you need to rack up some quick orgasms. There’s one called “the Rabbit” which I hear gets you going from several different angles at once, if you know what I mean. It was featured in a recent episode of “Sex in the City.”

Once you’ve cleared your system of all the toxins that back up when you stop getting off, you should immediately …

9) Get your head out of your ass.

Another of your complaints about D.C. is that the cabs don’t have meters. Are you really simple ? The zone system in D.C. is mandated by Congress (here’s that white thing again) so that they can ride to and from Capitol Hill as inexpensively as possible.

Attention, Ann: Guys won’t ask you for dates if you act stupid in public. Plenty of people don’t know the history of the zone system and cabs in D.C. They just don’t write about it in nationally published magazines.

It’s kind of like saying, “Hey guys, you’re right not to ask! I really am sorta culturally dumb …”

Which brings me to my 10th and final suggestion:

10) Don’t make your living as a sexual harpy.

Your principal occupation over the last three years, as I understand it, has been to traffic as many damaging stories as possible about Bill Clinton’s personal life, then write a book about it.

Blow this next sentence up on a photocopier and tape it next to your refrigerator:

“Men Don’t Want to Date Castrating Bitches Who Make Their Livings Peddling Tales of Male Weakness.”

Is your mom still alive? If she isn’t, I apologize, but you must have a trusted older friend you can talk to about this particular problem. You should ask her, and yourself: “Am I more likely to meet nice men and go out on dates if I volunteer for good works, hang out with a wide variety of cultures and views, and travel the world with a sunny disposition or if I work out frenetically, diet constantly and make my living shoveling dirt with both hands on MSNBC?”

What you and Tom DeLay and Ken Starr seem to have forgotten in the last two years is that an awful lot of men, and some women also, know that they look awfully silly nekked, yet still sometimes they can’t resist the urge to get nekked with the wrong people. What may be giving your dream-man pause is that, if he takes all his clothes off with you around, the smart money is that you’ll be e-mailing girlfriends with the vital stats before his BMW hits Chevy Chase the next morning. And, of course, if things don’t work out, worse things await him.

I’d like to conclude with a special bonus suggestion:

11) Get real.

You finish up your lament by writing, “My romantic fantasy is still this: Girl meets moving-company guy, girl moves back to New York.” Whaaa? Serious? That’s not your fantasy, and only some politically active Young Republican furniture movers are dumb enough to believe it.

My fantasy is to get Heidi Klum drunk at a party, but I’m not stupid enough to think I’ll be on the Concorde with her a year from now. You know what moving-company guys and mopeds have in common ? They’re both a lot of fun to ride, but you wouldn’t want your friends to catch you on one.

Please, Ann, for the love of God, understand yourself better. You want to meet a guy who’s got either a trust fund or a partnership in a blue-chip firm, who will worship the ground you walk on and won’t make noise when you’re caught pounding some cute advance man from the Bush campaign. You want a guy who dresses up well, doesn’t get drunk at parties and will take care of the kids while you’re at the studio. I wish you luck, and I’m sure you’ll get it, but don’t annoy us with the moving-man one anymore.

Those of us who know you and love you for your excellent entertainment value don’t want you to dilute your value by playing cutesy on us now. We want you tight-cropped, tattooed and with a Louis Vuitton riding crop, preferably in black boots and a miniskirt. You’re from New York. You know the look.

I hope to run into you sometime in one of my many favored bars in D.C. I’ll be the one with the potato skins and the Budweiser, reading the sports page I just lifted off the Metro.

Coulter admits she relies on Pethokoukis, so let’s go directly to the source. To recap, Nutting crunched Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office numbers to find that under Obama, spending has risen at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, less than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. It jumped 8.1 percent in the last three years of the George W. Bush presidency, and in fiscal year 2009, for which Bush approved the budget, it jumped 17.9 percent. But Bush isn’t the most profligate Republican: Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term.

Pethokoukis quarrels with Nutting’s assigning Bush’s budget to Bush, because “Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it.” Exactly how one president undoes the spending approved by another president under a different Congress goes unexplained. The AEI pundit also argues that we should look at federal spending as a percent of GDP, and he notes that’s gone up under Obama, attempting to prove that Nutting is mistaken – but that’s a useless metric during a recession, which by definition shrinks GDP.

Coulter goes even further (of course). “It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.” (The italics are in the original; they’re where the good writing is supposed to be.) She continues: “That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column.”

Shockingly, Coulter is … wrong. First of all, only about $120 billion of the stimulus was spent in fiscal year 2009 – and Nutting counted it in Obama’s column. He also included new funds appropriated under Obama and the Democratic congressional majority for the child health insurance program and other projects. And it says so quite clearly on the nifty chart Coulter finds fault with: $140 billion spent in the 2009 budget year is plainly attributed to Obama. It also says so in the text of the story, for people who don’t read charts.

“I attributed all the new spending I could find to Obama,” Nutting told me in an email. “I looked at the CBO’s budget outlook from Jan. 2009, and spending for ’09 was actually lower than CBO projected. And spending has been flat since then.”

Coulter also claims that Nutting’s piece has been ignored by the New York Times, but in fact David Firestone weighed in today, and made a point I should have made: It’s actually sad that a Democratic president is kvelling about cutting the rate of federal spending growth to its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower (actually, I made that point last August). Firestone notes that various budget deals aim to cut discretionary spending by $800 billion over a decade, by trimming education, food, housing, transportation and job training programs. “This category of spending, which used to be 5 percent of the gross domestic product in Nixon’s days, is heading down to less than 2 percent,” Firestone notes. Pethokoukis and Coulter ought to be applauding.

I’ve hailed Nutting’s piece not because I’m happy that Obama has presided over such stingy budgets (largely forced to by congressional Republicans), but because I’m glad to see a reporter telling the truth. If Pethokoukis and Coulter are the best the GOP can do to tear his work down, maybe more reporters will join him.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-2-2011/conservative-minorities-vs–liberal-minorities?xrs=share_copy

09/13/01: Remembering the Day We Forgot the Lessons of the Day We Had Sworn We Would Always Remember

A lot of people say Ann Coulter is toxic. But we had no idea that she would take that literally. You would laugh at her if she wasn’t making light of a terrible tragedy.

Watch Schultz’s segment in full. Note Ann Coulter’s glowing green head.

Coulter cites a 10-year-old newspaper article and some studies by fringe scientists as proof to her theory. She goes on to compare radition — which she says is “a sort of cancer vaccine” — to “poisons” like zinc and magnesium found in multi-vitamins.

Bill O’Reilly invited Coulter onto his show last night and scolded her for misleading the audience into misunderstanding the well established dangers of radiation: