According to Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter’s just signed a new book contract for nearly $3 million.

The Coulter bonanza is expected to be finalized this week at CROWN FORUM. The deal comes after more than 600,000 copies of her SLANDER and TREASON have been sold at market.

If you haven’t been living in a cave the past few weeks, you’ll know that Coulter’s latest book Treason is unique in receiving near universal condemnation from liberals and conservatives alike. David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan and Dorothy Rabinowitz have slammed it, and Spinsanity brilliantly ripped it to shreds in a much-cited article.

A few months ago, a perceptive critic remarked (paraphrased but pretty accurate), “Ann Coulter lies through every orifice of her body, including her pores.”

Her reward for unabashed, outrageous lies? Mountains of money. And I thought things were irrational in China.

It just bugs me because I am at a time of my life when I need to save more money and make some serious decisions (which are all based, unfortunately, on money), and this shit-spewing harpie shrieks inane accusations damning all liberals for the high crime of treason — treason! — and instead of locking her up or washing her mouth out with soap, what do they do? They pay her! No, the don’t just pay her; they pay her millions and millions and millions of dollars.

I want to scream, Ms. Coulter, have you no shame? Have you no sense of decency? But no, those are stupid and naive questions. She’s obviously way, way, way smarter than I am or ever will be. After all, she’s walking away with wheelbarrows of cash and I’m struggling to pay for my house in the US while also keeping my head above water here in Asia. So who’s the fool?

Did you know that in 2000, more than 300,000 women in China committed suicide, making it the only country in which relatively more women than men take their own lives? This article will help you understand why that is.

And I miss China?

It seems while I was gone America’s taken some quantum leaps toward liberalizing prime-time TV. I really had no idea just how far this revolution had proceeded until I read this eye-opening article by Frank Rich.

The article gives plenty of specifics as to how once-taboo topics have become typical prime-time fodder. Anything goes.

I would have thought that during the Age of Bush the media might have become more conservative, but it seems just the opposite is true. In fact, the administration has changed its tune when it comes to the “morality” issues they were whining about during the 2000 campaign.

It’s all about money, of course, as Rich tells us:

A classic example of the political turnaround is the current attorney general, John Ashcroft. In his 2000 senatorial campaign, he attacked his Democratic opponent for “standing with the producers of pornography and Hollywood’s worst trash” by accepting a $2,000 contribution from Christie Hefner, the chief executive of Playboy. You no longer hear Mr. Ashcroft, or anyone in the Bush administration, complaining about far larger political contributions from News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch, AOL Time Warner, Viacom or Marriott, to name just some of those who stand with the producers of pornography by either making their own soft-core variants or taking a cut when porn-industry videos are beamed through cable and satellite into hotels and homes.

There are only a handful of posts at this new blog by a student trying to cope with the miseries of learning Chinese, but for someone like me, also trying to deal with this migraine-inducing language, it’s quite interesting. I really like the online Chinese dictionary he pointed me too.

I’m not going to go on about Bush’s over-analyzed 16 words.

But I do want to point out an interesting example of what is either monumental self-deception or an intentional obfuscation of what lies at the heart of the issue. I refer to a post by Andrew Sullivan today:

The problem with the critics is that they ignore the context and the impossibility of complete certainty in intelligence.

This is the kind of punditry that gets me upset because it is so misleading, and I simply cannot believe that someone as smart as Sullivan doesn’t know how misleading it is.

The intelligence was exactly right. The CIA’s concerns were spot-on. It is not at all about any expectation of flawless intelligence. It is about a conscious and persistent effort to distort, alter, falsify or ignore that intelligence by the president of the United States and his highest minions and, along the way, smearing and/or scapegoating anyone who shows the temerity to challenge the administration’s perfidy.

I just re-read this post from some months ago, and I have to say, every word is utterly perfect. I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Update: My wording apparently caused some confusion. It’s a post about a great blogger, written by a fan, not by me.

I’ ve been getting emails alerting me to the fact that the Chinese characters to the right of the date, which are supposed to mean “sliced duck,” are incorrect and actually mean “opium.” I’ll have to have a long talk with Brainy Smurf the friend who supplied me with this odd cast of characters.

While my writing may have an opiating effect on some (and at times they even put me to sleep), I promise this was strictly a typographical error and will be fixed as soon as I get a jpg with the right characters.

If it’s an opium blog you’re looking for, go here (and let me know what language that is; Polish?).

Update: The hyperactive Brainy, who has obviously been drinking too much Chinese tea of late, has written a droll parody of this entire debacle.

Wow. Hauntingly beautiful post on the death of the Brothers Hussein, the butchers of Baghdad, as seen through the eye of their loving dad. Unforgettable.

[Via the foreign devil of HK.]

Exceptionally well-written and evocative post over at Daily Koz, that really brought a lump to my throat. While I may not agree with him on all issues, I do agree that the willingness with which the president’s men smear and ruin anyone who stands in their way has been unforgivable, and ultimately these sins will catch up with him.

A brief sample:

There are 20 year olds with prosthetic legs who aren’t getting past anything about Iraq. Its altered their lives permenently. If you ask for sacrifice, the reasons at least need to be sound. But with each passing day, you don’t get accountability from the White House, but the nastiest slurs and innuendo. Joe Wilson’s wife is exposed as a CIA officer, ABC reporter Jeffrey Koffman is smeared as a gay Canadian on Drudge, despite the fact that he did a big interview with the nation’s leading gay magazine, the Advocate.

Here’s a simple question for the White House political staff: do you think your smears hold the same power as the story of a young officer who’s lost both his limbs and is seeking to recover his life?

There’s much more. For the best analysis of the smearing, check this much-cited post by pro-Iraq war blogger Mark Kleiman. Brilliant and scholarly, as usual.

And I mean it. Go here at your own risk.