Has she no shame?

To transform McCarthy into a hero, Coulter carefully airbrushes all these unpleasant episodes from his career. "This version will be unfamiliar to most Americans inasmuch as it includes facts," she explains, introducing her biographical sketch of the Wisconsin senator. Perhaps it includes some facts, but it certainly omits others.

Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.

By Coulter's loose definition, his involvement in the Malmedy incident proves that McCarthy was a "traitor." He lied publicly to advance totalitarian forces in Europe against American interests. He sided with enemy forces against American soldiers. He falsely accused American officials of crimes. Moreover, he took up this tainted cause at least in part because of heavy financial support from an ultra-right-wing German-American businessman in Wisconsin. He managed to help both Nazis and communists at once, a feat rarely seen since the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

That irony would be lost on Coulter, as she proceeds with her single-minded smearing of Democrats and liberals. It turns out that all her raking over the ancient history of communism and anti-communism serves only as preparation to construct false contemporary analogies. Just as anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was a traitor, so was anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam or dissented from Reagan's war in Nicaragua or doubted Bush's war in Iraq.

In Coulter's beloved country there is no place for debate, only conformity. And in "Treason" there is no space for the complicated, mundane reality of American political life. Conservatives good, liberals bad, is her shrieking mantra. She knows what her audience will buy -- and that most of them aren't bright enough to notice the contradictions.

So while Patrick Buchanan is a good guy when he red-baits liberals during the Reagan era, he suddenly disappears from the pages of "Treason" when he opposes the war in Iraq. For that matter, so do all the right-wing critics of Bush's war, from Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas to the entire staff of the ultra-right Cato Institute. Their existence can't be acknowledged -- because if they do exist, they are "traitors," too. And there is no such creature as a right-wing traitor (which means that the dozens of Americans convicted of spying for Nazi Germany in 1942, the political leadership of the Confederacy, the Tories of the Revolutionary era, Timothy McVeigh, and Robert Hanssen all, naturally, go unmentioned in "Treason").

Likewise absent from Coulter's cracked cosmology are the liberals and Democrats who supported the Iraq war, including dozens of senators, members of Congress, the editors of the New Republic, the Democratic Leadership Council, and writers such as Paul Berman and Kenneth Pollack. According to her, Democrats voted for the war resolution only because they feared their true treasonous nature would otherwise be exposed. In fact, their votes in favor of Bush's resolution perversely proved that they were traitors!

"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a desire to aid the enemy." Somebody is raving here, but it isn't a liberal. With this book, Coulter has paid her homage and surpassed her master.

From now on, maybe we should call it Coulterism.

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