Ms. Right: ANN COULTER

But that's not (or not only) a joke. Coulter actually favors discrimination based on skin color in airports. She argues that airports should establish a separate line for men and boys whose complexion suggests they could be from the Middle East; they would be screened more thoroughly than other passengers.

"Basically," she says breezily, "aged 15 to 45--12 to 45, say. Swarthy men ... We'd be searching, you know, Italians, Spanish, Jews, males--but you're excluding the women. You're excluding the old people. You're excluding American blacks."

"Didn't we throw out discrimination based on skin color a long time ago?" I ask.

"This is just safety, and I wouldn't do it for drug dealing," she says. "I wouldn't do it for speeding. I wouldn't do it for a normal crime. It's a serious issue, but it is insane what is going on in the airports right now." Coulter's friends had told me that nothing angers her quite like standing in an airport security line. (She travels frequently to give speeches at $25,000 a pop--up to $50,000 if she must cross the Mississippi River.) Conveniently, her plan would let her glide through a metal detector the pre-9/11 way (shoes on, dignity intact).

Coulter says profiling makes sense when Muslims have committed virtually all the terrorist attacks against Americans for the past 25 years--she begins a terrorism timeline in her latest book with Iranian militants taking Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979. She says of Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City, Okla., "One does not a pattern make." And why wouldn't al-Qaeda recruit white or black Americans? "It's harder than it sounds. You're increasing the transaction costs."

It would be easier to accept Coulter's reasoning if a shadow of bigotry didn't attach to many of her statements about Arabs and Muslims. At the reception after her CPAC speech, she mocked some of the more ornate claims of torture from suspected terrorists detained by the U.S.: "It's completely insane stuff. 'The government flew me to Las Vegas and made me have sex with a horse,'" she said to laughter. But then she added with a grin, "Liberals are about to become the last people to figure out that Arabs lie." How did such a flagrantly impolitic person become such a force in our politics?

Ann Hart Coulter was born in New York City on Dec. 8, 1961. (That's according to her Connecticut voter registration. Coulter says she won't confirm the date "for privacy reasons"--she's had several stalkers. "And I'm a girl," she adds.) Her father John, 77, was a G.I. Bill student who became an FBI agent and then a corporate lawyer; Nell Martin, who raised Ann and two boys, is the daughter of a Paducah printmaker. Coulter learned to argue around a dinner table populated by a Catholic father, a Presbyterian mother and two brothers--one of them "a Presbyterian and an anti-Papist," Coulter says with a titter, and the other a Catholic. "And I'm like Hillary with the Mets and the Yankees--I root for both."