Letter from America/ Denis Staunton: After years spent cultivating her image as the rudest woman in the US, conservative commentator Ann Coulter has hit the jackpot with a book that has shot to the top of the bestseller lists - and offended practically everybody.
Godless - The Church of Liberalism is for the most part a shrill but fairly conventional conservative attack on the liberal forces Coulter accuses of hating both God and the US. She argues that liberalism has made itself America's established religion, with abortion as its sacrament, public schoolteachers its clergy, and Darwinism its creation myth. What has made Coulter's book a sensation, however, is her description of 9/11 widows as "witches and harpies" who revelled in their husbands' deaths.
Coulter's targets are four women from New Jersey - Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken - whose husbands died in the attack on the Twin Towers. Known as the Jersey Girls, the four led demands for an independent commission to investigate 9/11, a proposal the White House resisted at first.
"These broads are millionaires, lionised on TV and in articles about them, revelling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much . . . And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy," Coulter wrote.
Within hours of the book's publication, New Jersey politicians were calling for the book Godless to be boycotted - or even burned. New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, herself a frequent target of Coulter's bile, rushed to the Jersey Girls' defence.
"I find it unimaginable that anyone in the public eye could launch a vicious and mean-spirited attack on people whom I've known for the last four years to be deeply concerned about the safety and security of our country. Perhaps her book should have been called Heartless," Clinton said.
The widows themselves issued a dignified statement urging Americans to focus on persistent security problems and intelligence failures rather than on Coulter's book.
"Our only motivation ever was to make our nation safer. We have been slandered. Contrary to Ms Coulter's statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day," the women said.
As the controversy grew, so did sales of Godless - to almost 50,000 within its first week - and Coulter was appearing on every TV show from Today, the US's most popular breakfast show, to Jay Leno's Tonight show.
Wearing her trademark little black dress and peering through her long, lank blond hair, Coulter refused to apologise to the widows and hooted at Clinton's criticism.
"This is, I remind you, Bill Clinton's wife. If she's worried about people being mean to women, she should talk to her own husband," she said.
Conservatives have been quick to distance themselves from Coulter, although some have accused liberals of double standards in condemning Godless while endorsing scurrilous attacks on President George W Bush.
"She's over the top in my opinion, and I don't like her tactics at all and I think they diminish her," said Fox News star Bill O'Reilly.
Coulter claims that she is highlighting the Democrats' tactic of sending out figures such as the Jersey Girls and Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq, to attack Bush because most Republicans are reluctant to argue with a grieving wife or mother.
"I don't think the nation's attention has ever been as riveted on this 'victim as spokesman' as it has in the last week. I don't think that trick's going to work anymore," she told Leno.
Meanwhile, media commentators have been marvelling at Coulter's spectacular marketing success and wondering if the controversy was part of a clever publisher's plan. New York Times media reporter David Carr suggested that, while Coulter knew just what she was doing, the public was confused by the contrast between her elegant appearance and her wild, eccentric statements.
"Without the total package, Ms Coulter would be just one more nut living in Mom's basement. You can accuse her of cynicism all you want, but the fact that she is one of the leading political writers of our age says something about the rest of us," he wrote.