One would tink throwing around the word "faggot" would disqualify you from any future appearances. I wonder if they would have given her a post if she had used the word "nigger" so casually.

Um, Annie...where exactly does John Wilkes Booth fit into your little fantasy?

Or Charles J. Guiteau, assassin of John Garfield?

Richard Lawrence? (Who by the way thought he was King of England when he tried to kill Andrew Jackson, which I suspect makes him loonier than John Hinckely.)

Or John Schrank, who thought the ghost of McKinley ordered him to kill Theodore Roosevelt. (Hmm...another crazy person. The pattern I'm beginning to see here isn't the one Annie insists on...maybe somebody should keep an eye on HER?)

Giuseppe Zangara, would be killer of Franklin Roosevelt, also appears to have been mentally ill.

Arthur Bremer, would be Nixon assassin and the man who shot George Wallace, also fits neatly in the crazy category.

As does Samuel Byck, who plotted to kill Nixon by crashing a commercial airliner into the White House.

(Geez, guess Bush was right. NOBODY could imagine a plot to attack the US with commercial jets...27 years AFTER somebody tried to do it!)

Or Frank Corder, who in 1994 tried to kill Bill Clinton, also by crashing an aircraft into the White House?

(He missed and hit the lawn...but I'm beginning to think that just maybe this whole 9/11 thing wasn't nearly as unimaginable as Bush and his gang that couldn't shoot straight claim...)

In fact, it appears that the long list of presidential assassins and would be assassins includes but a handful who fit Annie's description. Lee Oswald, Leon Czolgosz, perhaps Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, the Puerto Rican independence activists who targeted Harry Truman.

At appears Annie is, as usual, just talking out of her ass...

She was back on NBC's The Today Show after the so-called dust up on Drudge about her being 'banned for life.' I was a captive audience so I tried to do other things (like make breakfast).

And of course, Matt Lauer had to try asking somewhat serious questions while treating her with a modicum of deference. It made me sick.

But the fault lies in ourselves, the American public. There are at least 20 million hardcore fans of Coulter and they are a plug and play audience - if she's on, they'll watch. Radio and TV programmers know this and act accordingly.

And of course, she's not the only one - there's Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, O'Reilly, Limbaugh and a host of others of varying degrees of outrageousness. They all have their own plug and play audiences and programmers will allow them far greater latitude in making outrageous statements - because as long as they're on the conservative side, they generally are in agreement with corporate America at some level. And, of course, if you wrap anything in the flag and patriotism, you can get away with verbal murder. I always remember the hilarious speech in "Animal House:" if you attack the frat, you're attacking America. Funny then, not so funny now!

And even at their best, Olbermann and Maddow only have a fraction of the above mentioned persons' audiences.

What we have lost, I think, is a certain civility and rationality in American discourse on all levels - not just media. And since we've devolved into a bread and circuses, lowest common denominator culture, I fear things will continue to degrade.

I sincerely hope our future isn't like the one portrayed in the movie "Idiocracy" but I wouldn't bet against it at this point.

Why do they keep talking to this twit?

gives voice (and a face) to the flaws, faults, and vices that we hate most about the extreme Right in this country and in the World. But because she has a crazed and ultra-loyal following of maybe one half of one percent of our population --those crackerjacks who all rush out to buy her books and buy tickets to her "events" -- she has made a fortune from being outrageous.

Is she actually influential? Probably not so much, since she's preaching to the choir. Is she an irritant to our Liberal butts? You bet. Is she rich? Yup -- unless she trusted Bernie Madoff.

I'll just add to the chorus of people who are asking: Why does anybody give Ann Coulter a forum?

Okay, so she's "good for ratings." Great -- stick her on Jerry Springer or something. Let her get into a girlfight with a sassy trailer queen. (Oh no you didn't!) Better yet, give Coulter her own show on Fox News from 3 a.m. to 4 a.m., so all the right-wing insomniacs can suck up her nonsense while finishing off the last of the Jim Beam and slipping into bitter unconsciousness.

But why put Coulter on a prime-time, mainstream news program?

What's wrong with you, news programmers? Why not just drive to each viewer's house and hit him/her over the head with a hammer?

I mean, she's just so over-the-top. I wonder sometimes if she's actually a leftist trying to present such off-the-wall right-wing opinions that she damages conservatives politically. The fact that she'll sometimes half-heartedly apologize, like Scott points out, saying she was trying to be "funny," makes it unlikely she's a double-agent, though.

The points she makes are so completely ludicrous, the only way she can hold her own is if the network puts her up against someone who either shares her views or is too dull or slow of speech to keep up with her rapid-fire non-sequiturs.

As far as what she's doing on network TV in the first place, it's probably her publisher who gets her on there. She's got a new book out every few months with a title like "American Liberals All Eat Babies" or whatever, and so the networks feel like they have to bring her on and talk to her about it.

I hope you're right when you suggest that Darth Ann may actually be an embarrassment to "Conservatives." And I hope that might be the beginnings of a trend.

My guess is that her solid fan "base" is not representative of most Republicans, but that lots of Repubs do occasionally like to see Liberals splashed with mud, no matter who is flinging the brown stuff.

One thing, though, we can say with certainty: She sure is ugly.

(Good job Bateman. Keep swinging, huh?)