At least now we know where Time magazine was going with its choice. Turns out Coulter’s inclusion was just a warm-up — a justification — for this week’s fawning Time cover story, “Ms. Right.” Polemicist pundits like Coulter purposefully drive political discourse into the ground, making a cushy, albeit factually challenged career out of labeling Democrats America-hating traitors. Time magazine stands on the sidelines and cheers, confident it has, for at least another week, placated conservative critics who demand proof that media outlets don’t lean left. (And even that didn’t work.)

Coming, as Wonkette.com noted, “seven years late,” Time’s Coulter push feels overly contrived. Her latest book is a five-month-old clip job of recycled columns. She has no full-time, high-profile media platform. Instead, she crisscrosses the country collecting $30,000 speaking-fee checks and shows up on late-night cable talk shows that are watched by the thousands.

The Time profile rings hollow right from the cover blurb: “Fair and balanced she ain’t. This conservative flame-thrower enrages the left and delights the right.” Time plays dumb, though, failing to note that Coulter has been abandoned by the conservative press, with the National Review dismissing her as “barely coherent” and a Weekly Standard writer, reviewing Coulter’s “Liberal Lies About the American Right” for the Washington Post, describing her book as “a piece of political hackwork.”

The true tipoff to the Time feature comes in the fourth paragraph, when it tries to get “serious with Coulter and asks her why she enjoys attacking liberals.” Here’s what follows:

“‘They’re terrible people, liberals. They believe — this can really summarize it all — these are people who believe,’ she said, now raising her voice, ‘you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all.’”

Puncturing the skulls of newborn babies? In order for the feature to stay afloat, Time has to ignore Coulter’s graphic riff on so-called partial-birth abortions as a symbol of Democratic beliefs, which it dutifully does. Author John Cloud seems to think the comment is darling, marveling how her response helped humanize her.

According to Time, Coulter, whom “you can trust will speak from her heart,” sees herself “as a public intellectual.” Cloud adds, “The officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire.” (During a recent C-Span appearance Coulter insisted, “Conservatives believe in God. By contrast, liberals believe they are God.” So much for intellect.)

And there’s this beaut: “Coulter is more like Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of this magazine’s co-founder, who rankled the Roosevelt establishment in the ’40s with her take-no-prisoners opposition to the New Deal and communism.” Actually, Clare Boothe Luce was a pioneering editor, playwright, politician, journalist and diplomat. Coulter is a professional name-caller.

The most awkward moment comes when Cloud writes: “Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words ‘Ann Coulter lies,’ you will drown in results. But I didn’t find many outright Coulter errors.”

Coulter’s publisher, Crown, had to correct five errors in “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right,” although scores more should have been fixed. Here are some lowlights:

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: