Ironically, it was Goldberg who had to clean up after Coulter at National Review Online when she and the conservative journal parted ways in 2001. On the heels of the 9/11 attacks, NRO published a controversial Coulter column that suggested the United States "invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Her words produced howls of protest, and Coulter fired off a defensive column attacking her critics. National Review balked. In a letter to readers at the time, Goldberg noted that Coulter's follow-up column was "barely coherent," adding that it "was Ann at her worst -- emoting rather than thinking, and badly needing editing and some self-censorship, or what is commonly referred to as 'judgment.' Running this 'piece' would have been an embarrassment to Ann, and to NRO."

When National Review editor Rich Lowry informed her of that fact and asked for changes to the column, he got no reply from Coulter. Instead, according to Goldberg, she "showed up on TV and, in an attempt to ingratiate herself with fellow martyr Bill Maher, said we were 'censoring' her." Sound familiar?

According to Coulter's press release this week, USA Today was not happy with the "tone, humor, [and] sarcasm" of her piece. (Perhaps the most amusing part of the manmade media drama was reading a dispatch Coulter wrote for Human Events -- the right-wing publication that employs her as a columnist -- in which she both referred to herself in the third person and then quoted herself ... in a story she wrote about herself.)

Actually, USA Today's Gallagher told a reporter for his own paper that the column had "basic weaknesses in clarity and readability that we found unacceptable."

That's being generous.

The column starts off comparing Democrats to Satan (that must be the Coulter "humor") and goes downhill from there. USA Today editors rightly suggested to Coulter that her jokes were not funny and the name-calling was not useful. But here are a few more trouble spots Coulter likely would have encountered if she had agreed to be edited:

  • Coulter asserts, "Democrats are constantly suing and slandering police as violent, fascist racists," but offers up just a single episode from 17 years ago.

  • Coulter, apropos of nothing, mocks the work habits of Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich, suggesting he could not run a 7-Eleven store for eight hours. She fails to mention that Kucinich once ran the city of Cleveland as the youngest mayor ever elected in a major city. He's also a U.S. representative.

  • Coulter scolds former Vice President Al Gore for recent remarks he made criticizing Bush for "deploying 'digital Brown Shirts' to intimidate journalists." More important, Coulter, lambasting the liberal media, insists, "Only one major newspaper -- the Boston Herald -- reported Gore's 'Brown Shirt' comment." The clear implication is that the press looked the other way. Yet according to a Nexis search, news of Gore's brownshirt comment appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Kansas City Star, Monterey County Herald, Chattanooga Times Free Press, Charlotte Observer, Tulsa World, Tampa Tribune and Augusta Chronicle; on Fox News and CNN.com; and in Reuters, the Scripps Howard News Service, the Cox News Service and Coulter's alma mater, National Review.

  • Coulter mocks Democratic delegates at the convention for their stance on the war: "On the basis of their placards, I gather the caged-nut position is that they love the troops so much, they don't want them to get hurt defending America from terrorist attack. 'Support the troops,' the signs say, 'bring them home.'" Coulter omits the fact that this is precisely the position of many military families: U.S. troops should be brought home immediately.

  • Coulter closes her piece with a nearly too-good-to-be-true quote from a "normal Bostonian" she met on the street, who just happened to be anonymous, and who suggested that Republicans are "American" and Democrats are not. Considering that a well-known Boston Globe columnist was accused a few years ago of cooking up quotes for his column from nonexistent Bostonians, editors at USA Today would have been wise to raise questions with Coulter.

    • But she was in no mood to talk.

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