Today Matt Drudge has been plugging Ann Coulter’s forthcoming book, Treason. Drudge’s plugs do tend to have some impact on Internet book buyers; he’s been boasting that Coulter’s book has passed Hillary Clinton’s on the Amazon bestseller list.

I don’t think there’s much likelihood that Coulter’s book will actually outsell Hillary’s, but it could be a steady seller for a while, like her last book -- or like Robert Patterson’s Dereliction of Duty (subtitle: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security ), which has been on the bestseller list for a couple of months. By contrast, as Drudge noted earlier this week, Sidney Blumenthal’s book The Clinton Wars has dropped off the New York Times bestseller list after three weeks.

Coulter complained in her last book that the mainstream press doesn’t pay enough attention to conservative books. But maybe there are worse things than being ignored by the mainstream press. Blumenthal’s book has been widely reviewed by mainstream publications -- and most of the reviews have been negative. Most right-wing authors don’t get negative reviews in the mainstream press because, well, they hardly get any reviews in the mainstream press. And that means that no one rebuts their arguments, no one challenges their assumptions, no one calls them on outrageous and scurrilous things they say.

Drudge notes that Coulter’s new book contains a full-throated defense of Joe McCarthy (‘"The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times.... Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie") and accuses Democrats of “fifty years of treason” (presumably Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, and the man who first gave American support to the Afghan mujahideen, Jimmy Carter, were inadequately anti-communist for Coulter). The book is undoubtedly a hash and a fraud -- but it’s quite possible that most readers will never know that, because many mainstream publications will consider it unworthy of a review. Meanwhile, rank-and-file right-wingers will buy it, read it, and quote it -- it may become the primary source of information on McCarthyism and the early days of the Cold War for all too many readers. Its ideas and factoids, however inaccurate, will find their way into conservations. And no one (except for a few Internet cranks) will take seriously the task of rebutting its exaggerations and half-truths.

Recently I looked up some right-wing books in the archives of The New York Review of Books and the Books section of The New York Times. I learned that none of the following had ever received a review in either publication:

The Savage Nation by Michael Savage

Unlimited Access by Gary Aldrich

The Final Days and Hell to Pay by Barbara Olson

Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity

Dereliction of Duty by Robert Patterson

Useful Idiots by Mona Charen

The New Thought Police and The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce

These books demonize. They level wild charges. And all of them sold well -- some were #1 bestsellers. Yet America’s two most influential book reviews ignored them.

It shouldn’t matter that these books are shrill and simpleminded. What should matter is that large numbers of American voters go to the polls on election day thinking about the ideas in these books (and on talk radio, Fox News, and so on).

If book review editors don’t want to assign serious scholars or journalists to review books such as these, couldn’t they seek out reviews from smart, caustic observers of American society -- say, Joan Didion or Martin Amis?

Smart media types ignored talk radio for a decade, and now we have an all-right-wing federal government. Why are they making the same mistake with right-wing books?