Ann Coulter, woman

But Bush didn't stop the government photographer from doing the "fucking elephants" photo op.

I was going to put up the photo [on my Web site] that Time magazine ran of me two weeks ago as the case in point why Republicans have their own photographers.

Why?

Take a look at it.

Was it unflattering?

That does not begin to describe it.

When you wake up in morning, do you have to do massive makeup stuff, or are you fine?

No. That's not the problem. The problem is when I'm drinking and they take the photo. The one best photo of me that's run in any magazine was taken by my brother's 12-year-old babysitter before we all went to a party. She managed with two photos with a disposable camera to get a real flattering photo of me. But professional photographers spend 45 minutes to make sure they have six shots of me talking with my eyes half closed.

You aren't married, are you?

No.

You plan to get married?

I'd have to find the right person.

Is your mother alive?

Both my parents are alive.

So they both must ask you this: "When are you gonna get married?"

Not at all. They're much too excited about my political career.

Oh, that seems like it is so American: "When you gonna have babies and settle down?"

Maybe that's another Connecticut thing.

Do you have a political plan?

A plan?

To run for office.

Oh no no no. I was going to against Jesse Ventura's fraudulent third-party campaign. And knock him out. And get a real Republican in.

Don't you think the aesthetic culture of America is liberal as opposed to Republican?

I don't know what that means.

Only this year was Norman Rockwell acknowledged as a great artist. Before that Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol was what great art was considered to be in America.

I'm not sure I would agree that Norman Rockwell is a great artist. I wouldn't hang any of them on my wall. I don't know that I'd call him a conservative artist.

Do you have art hanging on your walls?

A lot of Spanish art. I spent my summers in Spain growing up. Goya and Velázquez. That sort of thing. I also have very nice print of George Washington.

When you were a teenager did you listen to "devil's music" -- rock 'n' roll?

Not only when I was a teenager. To this day.

So don't you think that pop culture is liberal?

I've never thought about it before. I would make the opposite argument, and I'm not the first one to point this out: The one reason we have no great American novelists is that all the smartest writers from Harvard end up going to Hollywood and writing movies. And if you look at which movies are successful, despite the liberal schlock they stuff down our throats, the movies tend to be family-oriented conservative movies.

Can you give me an example?

"Forrest Gump." On TV, "Touched by an Angel" was fabulously successful. Even "Something About Raymond," which I've only seen a few minutes of (and I don't find it particularly funny). Its runaway popularity is because it is one of the rare shows on TV right now that is not about gay men.

I'll ask two personal questions at once: Do you date? And what do you do for recreation if you do date? Movies? Restaurants?

The only thing I don't do for recreation is go to movies. Sometimes I rent movies, but then you can get a bunch of them, and if you don't like one you can turn it off. I guess that is part of the reason I don't go to movies. So many of them are so bad you don't want to pay $6 and walk out 10 minutes into it. Yes, I date, but from there I will be as honest as Bill Clinton was under oath.

Is one's social life private?

Mine is. Apparently a lot of people's aren't.

The prejudice is that conservatives want to dominate private life, such as dating and your sex life.

That's just preposterous fantasy. It is constantly the blue states oppressing the red states, not the red states oppressing the blue states. It's not like Jerry Falwell is flying to New York and going over the school's curriculum, demanding that we shut down the Halloween parade. To the contrary. It's Malibu and New York and their buddies on the Supreme Court saying, "No prayers in school! No Ten Commandments in the court. Abortion must be legal everyplace." It's a famous story how the Moral Majority got started in the first place -- Christians never really voted. They never paid attention to politics. They lived by themselves. They really didn't think of themselves as Republican or Democrat, but the cultural oppression from the left just got to be too much. And Jerry Falwell started mobilizing against them.

Culturally speaking, trends and taste are like a pendulum in America. They swing right. They swing left. It used to be married couples like Ozzie and Harriet had to sleep in separate beds. Now people get naked on television --

And sodomy is gleefully laughed upon now. I keep telling my friends in Hollywood that I have a novel idea for a new TV show -- "How about a show about a heterosexual couple."

Don't worry. Things are gonna spin back to Beaver Cleaver's America.

One thing I really find amazing is what a religious country this is -- ever since the Pilgrims landed. And all the cultural indicators coming from TV and Hollywood and the Supreme Court and the lefties and Vanity Fair is to constantly make fun of people who believe in God and portray them one step short of a Nazi. Still after 30 years of this, you poll the American people, and 80 percent of them believe in God and regularly go to religious services.

Back in the 18th century, Europeans commented on how God-crazy we were.

That is the point of my book. Liberals are like Europeans; they're secular. I think there is a reason that Hitler could never come to power. As de Tocqueville says, "American religion prevents Americans from doing things that the law doesn't forbid." Back to your original point, about who is the greater oppressor: Who would you rather live under, me or Hillary Clinton?

I'll take the Fifth.

I wouldn't tell you, you couldn't enjoy a little tobacco pleasure at a bar. I've been staying in a modern building in New York ... everything that is unpleasant in life has been brought to us by liberals. One of them is the fact that we can only have two tablespoons of water in our toilet bowls because of some idiotic conservation of water. It's wacky enough for liberals to think about global warming, but that we would run out of natural resources? It rains. The water doesn't go away. Because of liberal government bureaucrats, they decided that we can only have two tablespoons of water in the toilet. You throw half a tissue in the toilet and you have to flush it 16 times.

Haven't you heard of this natural phenomenon called drought? This is the first summer in ages that New York hasn't been on drought alert. It would rain in the city, but not over the damn reservoirs. Was the sky filled with Republican clouds or Democratic ones?

I'm confident that the reservoirs are full after this spring.

How come you're not ranting more with me?

That's just sexist, liberal slander from men as usual. Even though liberals make wild confessions of how they respect women, they really believe women should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. And when they hear a woman who has an opinion, their response is, "She's angry! She rants!" This is just liberal sexism.

Are you sure?

Yes! You could watch my performances, and consistently I'm a lot lighter. Liberals expect you to roll over: "Shut up and listen to us." If you don't roll over and abandon your long-held beliefs, "How dare you refuse to abandon your position?"

So conservatives are not as sexist as they're portrayed? No one ever says to you, "When are you gonna go get a spatula in your hand and go cook?"

No, they don't, if nothing else because they've been harangued for being sexist so much.

Do you get asked a lot of moral questions? How moral should the government be and what should they stick their noses into?

The government should be absolutely moral, but I think your question goes to--

An interesting sexual issue that concerns Mormons and Traci Lords (who made porn films when she was 16) is at what age is an American girl an American woman? 18? 21? There has to be some sort of governing on it, but--

But it shouldn't come from the federal government. You can look and look and look, but there is actually nothing in the Constitution about abortion or sodomy. By the way, back to my original point, who's jamming whose moral values down the rest of the country's throat? There's nothing in the Constitution one way or another. It doesn't forbid abortion and it doesn't permit abortion. It doesn't forbid sodomy. It doesn't command sodomy. Who's winning that one?

But I'm thinking that there has to be a national consensus on the issue of age. It's not like American girls should be able to be married or make kiddie porn in Utah. The government has to say, "You are a child and you are not responsible..."

There's no reason the federal government has to say any of this. There is no reason we have to have a department of education. There is no reason we have to have the federal government saying how many gallons of water we can have in our toilets.

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