On John + Ann = 4-eva

And unfortunately, it has nothing to do with me and John Cusak.

Okay, so Atrios points us at this charming little >interview with John Cloud, newly famous for his 5,500-word exploration of the inside of Ann Coulter's colon. The results are, well, not any prettier than John's story.

The thing that absolutely bugs my rhetorical nuts is his defense of his statement, "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." My immediate response, upon reading that, was, "Well, that's 'cause you're lazy, John." But I'm a big person, and I like to give people a chance to defend themselves; this allows them to either explain themselves or fully cover themselves in their own poop.

John Cloud is a poop-coverer.

"David Brock, who knew Ann Coulter from years ago, goes to a book that's years old, and prints some mistakes from that book, and of course [there are] mistakes. And a lot of them are corrected. If you go out and you buy a copy of Slander now, you won't find those mistakes in it, because the publisher has corrected them."

Yes, John, the publisher corrected her errors. That's because the errors were put in by Ann Coulter. It doesn't mean that Ann Coulter doesn't lie; it means that Ann Coulter doesn't always get away with it. Unless, of course, her lies are overlooked by someone who thinks that she's pretty and cool and wants to kiss her and hug her and rub her Adam's apple all night long.

"I don't say in this story that she's never made a mistake. In fact, I point out some mistakes. This is a story that calls some of her writing highly amateurish. I say I want to shut her up occasionally. I quote a friend of hers calling her a fascist [and] another friend of hers calling her a polemicist. I quote Eric Alterman, Salon, James Wolcott, Andrew Sullivan, and Jerry Falwell all criticizing her. The idea that this is a puff piece is just absurd."

"Ew, I don't like her, that's gross. Look, see, I'm hitting her in the arm! Look! You can tell I don't like her, 'cause I'm hitting her in the arm!"

"The cover of our magazine is not glorification. It is news."

Um, if one would define "news" as "things being new and/or interesting," what exactly has Ann Coulter done, of late, that qualifies?

"And, by the way, the picture that we used on the cover is apparently such a horrible image for conservatives that they can't even read the story."

As opposed to the content, which is so horrible that no one can read it.

"What I'll say is that I think Eric Alterman and Ann Coulter engage in the same kind of debate. They don't often make actual arguments. Instead, they throw names around. This is the point of my article."

No, the point of your article is that Ann Coulter is, like,totally your girlfriend. F'real.

Correction: I incorrectly state above that Coulter's publisher, rather than Coulter herself, is responsible for all of her corrections. She has been known to make corrections herself, as in the difference between the hard and paper versions of her book Slander. On the last page of the hardcover, she makes the following assertion:

The day after seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt died in a race at the Daytona 500, almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page. Stock-car racing had been the nation’s fastest-growing sport for a decade, and NASCAR the second-most-watched sport behind the NFL. More Americans recognize the name Dale Earnhardt than, say, Maureen Dowd. (Manhattan liberals are dumbly blinking at that last sentence.) It took the New York Times two days to deem Earnhardt’s name sufficiently important to mention it on the first page. Demonstrating the left’s renowned populist touch, the article began, "His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart." The Times went on to report that in vast swaths of the country people watch stock-car racing. Tacky people were mourning Dale Earnhardt all over the South!

However, when it was brought to her attention that the Times did, in fact, provide a front-page article the very next day, sans any mention of any discount retailers. Coulter is kind enough to make the following change for the paperback edition:

...(Manhattan liberals are dumbly blinking at that last sentence.) Demonstrating the left’s renowned populist touch, the New York Times front-page article on Earnhardt’s death three days later began, “His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.” The Times went on to report that...

which only implies, inaccurately, that the Times was remiss in their coverage, instead of lying about it outright.

If Cloud is interested in any other examples of Coulter as pathological liar with flaming pants, he can check out the Daily Howler, whence I so blatantly stole this correction.