the inevitable
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Those of you who are unfortunate enough to have abused stimulant drugs in the past like cocaine or methamphetamine will know what I'm talking about when I refer to the ass-end of a drug binge. It's what happens when you've been awake for days, repeatedly strafing your brain chemistry with more go-powder, and pushing yourself way beyond the limits of what your mind and body were meant to withstand.

The lack of food and sleep, not to mention the tidal waves of adrenal chemicals that have buffeted your brain and heart all combine to leave you shaky, jumpy, aching, and exhausted. Your heart is pounding and pounding out of control and you yearn to finally shut down and go to sleep, but sleep is miles and miles away.

Feelings of intense panic and paranoia are common, as well as uncontrollable trembling. A terrible sense of dread and worthlessness yawns open in your soul and you feel lower than a piece of shit on the Devil's heel. Everybody's out to get you. Nobody understands. You can't stand yourself and you're filled with awful feelings of remorse and sorrow, and this is exactly the state of mind that makes drug users have sex with people they wouldn't share a pizza with sober. Anything (or anyone) is preferable to being left alone with your howling, injured brain.

No one can say for sure what exactly is going on with Ann Coulter's blood chemistry, possibly not even her. Having had some of these experiences myself, though, I can't say that her pattern of freakish, erratic behavior looks entirely unfamiliar.

Apparently during a phone appearance on this morning's "Morning Joe", Coulter had arrived at her own Hour of the Wolf. She may have been just as sober as a judge, but if so, her impression of a geeked-up drug whore on a down is better than Angelina Jolie's in "Gia". In a rambling, incoherent monologue that Scarborough was at odds to keep from smirking at, Coulter executed a perfect four-point Reverse Malkin, cloaking herself in the mantle of victimhood while angrily lashing out at her critics.

Media Matters:

COULTER: I comment on America in a lively and entertaining way. These are legitimate topics and I'm a little sick of being browbeaten by a bunch of harridans about why I chose this word or why I told that joke. And then people turn around and say "Oh, you're so mean! You're so mean!"

SCARBOROUGH: Well, Ann, I'm not browbeating you here. I'm trying to put it in proper context.

COULTER: (cross-talking) Well, you haven't spent 24 hours being asked, "Oh, why did you use this word?"

SCARBOROUGH: OK.

COULTER: I've never seen people avoid ideas so much in such an obvious way and try to alert Americans not to read anything, not to listen to something someone says -- not because of what she's saying, but by trying to portray her as a Nazi. This happens every time I put a book out, and I'm getting a little bored with it. To use a Smith College word, it's getting a little tiresome.

Yes, you read that right. Ann Coulter has called someone else "tiresome". Like a TBogg headline once said, "Pots and Kettles announce that they can no longer keep up."

You should go watch the video, though. The transcript doesn't really convey the raging, frantic word salad that came spilling over the phone line.

Maybe somebody told her how badly her book sales are tanking. If you look at Amazon, the paperback edition of "Godless" is currently languishing in the lower 600's in sales and falling. As commenter Dave said the other night:

Earlier, I checked out Amazon’s Top 100 Non-fiction Politics books. Coulter’s new paperback version of “Godless” went from #85 to #98 while I was there.

People with books ranked higher than Coulter’s:

* Glenn Greenwald (his latest, of course, as well as “How Would a Patriot Act?”, which no dead tree book review would touch when it came out)
* Marcy Wheeler (yay!)
* Noam Chomsky
* Joe Conason
* Greg Palast

All of these people are currently selling more books on Amazon than Coulter. Amazingly, despite her appearance on Tweety’s show, her sales, pathetic as they were, not only did NOT improve, they actually went DOWN.

So, Tweety, when can we expect to see Greenwald, Wheeler, Chomsky, Conason, or Palast on your show for the full hour?

So much for Tweety's cheap justifications for having the old bag on, "We have sold a lot of her books tonight. I don't know if I can go to confession fast enough."

Uh, no, actually, Chris. Nobody's buying it. Maybe the Big Daddy book-clubs who do those massive buy-outs to get her on the NYT charts took a pass on this one. Maybe everyone in the tiny remaining slice of society who might actually want it knows that they'll get a copy for free with a subscription to the Stormfront newsletter.

I wonder if she even realizes how many people who buy her books never actually read them. Crown might as well be shipping book-shaped boxes of sawdust. Of course, if you've read one of Ann's books, you realize that they aren't actually meant for reading. The pages might as well just say, "All work and no play makes Ann a dull girl" over and over and over. Jumbled, sophomoric, shoddily researched, I think it's pretty clear to her that she's no Faulkner. Those little square bundles of pressed paper are merely door-stops that prop open the portals to more media attention, the drug that she'll do until until it kills her, or until someone takes it away.