With even folks on the right worried that Ann Coulter has "gone too far," the slimers try to equate her with Al Franken and Michael Moore

One question I don't lose sleep over is (gasp), Has that nice Ann Coulter gone too far? (You know, with that diatribe in her book against the 9/11 widows.)

I have a funny history with our Annie. For a good while, I used to listen to Howie rage about her, and I assumed I knew who she was—yet another indistinguishable right-wing talking head, I thought. THEN I SAW HER "IN ACTION." Yikes! I couldn't even begin to describe it. But surely you've seen . . . it.

Eventually, I had to swear off watching Bill Maher, when it turned out that, since he considers her one of his best friends, she could slither her way into my living room at any time if I allowed HIM in. No, thank you. My only interest in her after that was depressed wonderment that you can actually make a living being that ignorant and that violent and abusive.

I have a new interest, though, and that is Bill O'Reilly's enunciation (joined by Rush and the Lesser Flacks, I assume) of the right's latest Bogus Equivalency: Annie C on their side, Al Franken and Michael Moore on ours.

False equivalencies are of course a prime tool of the right-wing demagogues. If Rachel Maddow ever does the compilation we need of her daily "Underbelly" segments, which isolate and spotlight favorite techniques from their playbook, this one should turn up with some frequency. And it drives me nuts.

Yes, Al Franken and Michael Moore have beliefs, strongly held ones. But they are also sticklers for truth. In their different ways, they are both obsessive about digging out the truth of the subjects they cover. They certainly never spew raw prejudice, which is what our Annie pretty much only does. She doesn't care the slightest about facts or truth or reality, and I mean this absolutely literally. All she has to offer is the psychotic "truth" of her unprocessed mental cesspool of lies and stupidities.

I keep saying that for me the single most interesting revelation in David Brock's confessional Blinded by the Right is his wildly belated awakening—after he was already a highly paid and esteemed "journalist" of the right—to the fact that what he had learned to do from his right-wing mentors had nothing to do with journalism. At least in theory, journalists approach a story by trying to find out what the story is. We all understand that hardly any journalists really do that all the time. They set out on a story with at least some mental model of what it is, and too many of them are reluctant to let go of those preconceptions as they undertake, you know, actual reporting.

But traditional journalists at least pretend that that's what they're doing. Brock came to understand that his brethren didn't even have that as a goal. What they did was start with a polemical position—an extreme right-wing one, naturally—and then shake the bushes for any shreds of fact or fiction to dress it up. At a certain point they don't even care whether their window dressing has any basis in reality, only whether it can be portrayed as having some.

When Brock came to do a mea culpa for his sliming of Anita Hill, it occurred to him that while he was mucking up the slime, he never really worried about whether any of it was believable. The only test was whether it was stuff with a "source" which gullible people could be made to believe.

(For that matter, anyone old enough to remember the Anita Hill ruckus at Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings may remember the contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Those poor befuddled Dems kept trying to figure out: Were the Hill charges about Thomas true? Meanwhile the crafty Repubs—led by Arlen Specter, in what remains one of the vilest public performances in American political history—focused on only one thing: getting the obvious slimeball confirmed. In other words, winning.)

More power to David Brock for eventually seeing the light. Look how many of those right-wing bogus journalists never do. It's interesting that in his remade configuration, he has become a tiger for journalistic truth.

The process of right-wing phony journalism is also, of course, the way Republican "talking points" work. Oh, there are probably a few really, really dumb Republican pols, and a few really dumb Fox "newshounds" (Sean Hannity? John Gibson?), so stupid that they actually believe the manure that Karl Rove and his minions dish up for them. But they can't all be that stupid.

No, I assume that most of them repeat the vile lies, mindlessly and joyfully, because they have the screwy notion that they're in possession of some kind of Higher Truth, and anything you say or do in the service of Higher Truth is justified.