The new New York Times bestseller list is in. Hillary Clinton is still #1; Ann Coulter is still #2. Walter Isaacson's much-hyped Benjamin Franklin leaps onto the list at #3; I think that book, not Coulter's, could be the one that knocks Hillary's book off the top of the list when that finally happens.

By the way, let me thank Dorothy Rabinowitz for her blistering review of Coulter's book. The column ran on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, but Rabinowitz doesn't shrink from criticizing a movement conservative on the movement conservatives' home turf -- she knows Coulter's book is a fraud, and she says so.

A dozen or so years ago, Rabinowitz denounced prosecutions of so-called ritual abuse at day-care centers; Debbie Nathan had written similar articles in The Village Voice, but Rabinowitz made it acceptable to question the veracity of outlandish and often physically impossible stories of abuse. Not enough people had the guts to buck a juggernaut then; Coulterism is less noxious than ruining day-care workers' lives and inducing false memories of abuse in children, but far too many people in the mainstream are afraid -- and I mean that literally -- to call Coulterism bullshit. Yes, Joe Conason debunked Coulter's book in Salon, and Spinsanity has had its say, but an awful lot of voices in the media have been muted or silent on this and previous irresponsible Coulter attacks and group slanders. Too many people in the "liberal" media have so internalized Coulter's (and other hard-rightists') hatred of them that they chose to keep Coulter in their Rolodexes even after she expressed delight at the thought of a McVeigh-style mass murder of New York Times employees -- their journalistic colleagues. Will Rabinowitz's willingness to say, in a large-circulation periodical, that Coulter's garbage is garbage give other reviewers the guts to do the same? I wonder.