Oh, dear ... please tell me he's joking:

According to [Steve] Ross, the idea for Crown Forum [Ross's new all-conservative book imprint, distributed by Random House] grew out of his relationship with one of the group's stars, Ann Coulter, whose "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right" spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 400,000 copies.

"Ann and I began talking while I was working with her on 'Slander,' which posits the existence of a liberal slant so organic to so many of our American institutions that we don't even recognize it as such," Ross said. "In working with her and thinking about

-- I hope you're sitting down for this --

the meticulous way she made her case, I came to recognize that what she was saying is fundamentally true with regard to book publishing...."

"Meticulous"? "Meticulous"?? Er, I don't think so.

The quote comes from an L.A. Times article about the new imprint (which is called Crown Forum because, I guess, He-Man Liberal-Haters' Club wouldn't fit on the spines of the books). The article gets one or two facts wrong (Free Press is still going strong, as an ideology-free imprint of Simon & Schuster, and was never exclusively conservative -- even in its heyday it published the loony but left-wing Andrea Dworkin). It leaves unchallenged Ross's erroneous statement "Most mainstream houses don't publish any conservative titles at all" (Rush Limbaugh's books were published by a Simon & Schuster imprint; William Bennett has been published by Simon & Schuster, Free Press, and Doubleday; Sean Hannity is a HarperCollins author; David Frum is published by Random House; Peggy Noonan has past or forthcoming books from HarperCollins, Viking Penguin, Random House, and Free Press; Laura Ingraham's Hillary Clinton book was first published by ABC/Disney's Hyperion; etc., etc.). But it does provide this fascinating tidbit, from a book written by Tammy Bruce and published by an earlier iteration of Crown Forum, Forum Prima:

There are all sorts of nasty elites in Bruce's moral schema, including black ones, academic ones and an entertainment one whose "moral depravity is beyond measure." Ozzy Osbourne, by the way, is "a moral terrorist."

Un -f@%&*ing -believable.