Leonard Pitts Jr.: 'Ann Coulter: Vicious front woman for the malicious right'

WASHINGTON // Apparently, it's news that Ann Coulter is a nasty piece of work.

I had rather thought that was the attraction, at least for those people who find her attractive. So forgive me for being mildly mystified by recent headlines about her most recent spasm of trash mouth, i.e., her attack on four women who lost their husbands in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But then, the attack is vicious even by Ms. Coulter's standards: In her latest book, whose title you won't read here, she savages the widows as "self-obsessed" and "witches."

"These broads are millionaires," she writes, "lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much."

Evidently, the widows' sins are that they pushed for an independent commission to investigate 9/11 intelligence failures, they are critical of the Bush administration and they endorsed Sen. John Kerry for president.

The nerve of them.