Not all conservatives may be bigoted harpies, but all bigoted harpies are conservative – at least all bigoted harpies who come to speak at UCSB for a $5,000 fee for an hour or two.

That sentence structure, with all its broad generalizations, is stolen from Ann Coulter, a bigoted conservative harpy who is speaking tonight in North Hall. When she wrote it, the sentence read, “Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims – at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours.”

That’s neither the stupidest nor the most racist thing Coulter has written. The pistol-packing blond who wears miniskirts on CNN has said airport security guards need to pay special attention to “any suspicious-looking swarthy males” and that if we think we’ve found terrorists, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Those last two lines got the syndicated columnist fired by the conservative National Review Online, which is like getting fired by Hustler for being raunchy. Coulter declared that the National Review’s editors “are just girly-boys” and said her remarks had been taken out of context and were tongue-in-cheek.

The rest of Coulter’s column – the one with invading, killing and converting – was about the death of her friend and fellow career-Clinton-hater Barbara Olson. It was about as tongue-in-cheek as a nervous breakdown at a funeral. She says she was talking only about Muslims who celebrated the attack.

“I wasn’t talking about Muslims generally,” she told the Washington Post, “I was talking about the crazed homicidal maniacs dancing in the streets.”

Since then, sweet little Annie has clarified herself a little more in her columns.

“How are we to distinguish the peaceful Muslims from the fanatical, homicidal Muslims about to murder thousands of our fellow citizens?” she wrote in a column calling for the deportation of all Muslims from suspect countries. “The only thing we know about them – other than that they live among us – is that they are foreign-born and they are Muslims.”

There was at least one laugh line in that column, though. “It is impossible to stop Islamic fundamentalists who believe that slaughtering thousands of innocent Americans will send them straight to Allah,” she wrote, implying that the slaughtered innocents will be sent straight to Allah. She also forgot, or never knew, that “Allah” is simply the Arabic word for the same God that Christians and Jews believe in. Reading Coulter is kind of fun. It’s like watching a small child throw alphabet blocks in a temper tantrum.

Speaking of the perpetually angry and marginally literate, Coulter has hopped onboard with neo-ultra-frothomatic-conservative David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. Horowitz and Coulter are old comrades in arms. Horowitz went out of his way last spring to defend her after she gave a speech at Cornell University on “The Real Meaning of the Confederate Flag.”

Oh, and I didn’t quite copy the sentence form because my number is correct. Coulter’s is not. At last check, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks claimed about 4,845 lives, a horrific number that doesn’t need inflation and that Coulter could have easily checked. Although, that might have broken the flow while she was calling all terrorists Muslims, forgetting that before Sept. 11, the worst terrorist attack on American soil was committed by a God-fearin’, gun-totin’, government-hatin’ American: Timothy McVeigh.

Some of the most un-American people live in the good old U.S. of A.

-Brendan Buhler