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So Falwell and Robertson are a little nuts, right? And what Falwell said was pretty disgusting. Everyone can agree on that. Even Robertson later apologized. He said he had been distracted by something in his earpiece and hadn’t really been focusing on what was coming out of Falwell’s mouth.

Ann Coulter wrote about this incident in Slander. So who did she go after? Walter Cronkite. The man she calls that “pious leftwing blowhard.”

In the wake of an attack on America committed by crazed fundamentalist Muslims, Walter Cronkite denounced Jerry Falwell. Falwell, it seems, had remarked that gay marriage and abortion on demand may not have warmed the heart of the Almighty. Cronkite proclaimed such a statement “the most abominable thing I’ve ever heard.” Showing his renowned dispassion and critical thinking, this Martha’s Vineyard millionaire commented that Falwell was “worshipping the same God as the people who bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon” (the difference being liberals urged compassion and understanding toward the terrorists).

Just another small taste of poison from Slander. There’s no further description of what Falwell had actually said, that he had pointed his finger and accused other Americans of causing the deaths of three thousand people. Mentioning that would have blown another chance to distort and spew.

She also does a lot of spewing in Chapter Nine, “Shadowboxing the Apocryphal ‘Religious Right.’ ” The whole chapter is devoted to denying the existence of the religious right in this country except insofar as it is a “boogeyman” for the left. The “Religious Right,” she claims, is “a meaningless concept,” “an inverted construct of the left’s own Marquis de Sade lifestyle.”

First of all, on this Marquis de Sade lifestyle. I’ve been married twenty-seven years, have two kids who’ve turned out fairly well, and a wife who runs my life. Ann, on the other hand, is forty-something, has never been married, and has the personality of a dominatrix. Who’s kidding who?

Secondly, if Coulter doesn’t think the religious right exists, she should really get out more. I’ve been to Christian Coalition events, and there are a lot of people there.1

On its website, the Christian Coalition makes no bones about its existence. Specifically, it claims to be “the largest and most active conservative grassroots political organization in America.” According to their website, the Christian Coalition has fifteen hundred local chapters around the country. During the 2000 election, they distributed more than seventy million “voter guides.”

A perhaps more objective source on the strength of the Christian right than either Ann or the Christian Coalition is Campaigns and Elections, a Washington magazine. According to a study they published in February 2002, Christian conservatives now exercise either “strong” or “moderate” influence in forty-four Republican state committees—compared with thirty-one committees in 1994, the last time the survey was conducted. They are weak in only six states. Guess what region of the country all those states are in? If you said “the South,” you’d be so wrong. No, those six states are in the Northeast.

The point is, they’re big and they’re growing.

Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition executive director, is now chair of the Georgia Republican party and probably the second most powerful Republican operative outside the White House. The most powerful is Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, who once declared, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Tough talk, Grover. But not very Christian-sounding talk.

Bush has managed to form a coalition between Christian conservatives like Reed and mean antigovernment conservatives like Norquist. And hawkish Jewish neo-conservatives. The neo-cons and the Christian Right have formed a close bond on Israel. Though for slightly different reasons. Neo-cons support the Jewish state