Name-calling lefty leaders live in Hotel Denial

A reader sent an e-mail with constructive criticism. He called me a "rabid witch." I offer my personal e-mail address, and this is the best liberal minds can offer?

However, I'm a two-bit columnist. Liberalism's finest minds focus on the right's big guns: Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and, when liberals tell the story of the 2000 presidential elections, all of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Who are the left's heavy hitters? Al Franken! Saturday Night Live's Stuart Smalley, the 12-step Richard Simmons-like character, has been hoisted by the left's petard to icon. His books? "I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me," Stuart Smalley's tome, and perfect NEA training manual for new teachers. This literary masterpiece was followed by "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot."

His new book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," features cover pictures of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, George Bush and Dick Cheney — the "liars" of the right.

Eric Alterman, with his "What Liberal Media: The Truth About BIAS and the News," has also emerged as a lefty leader. After slogging through Alterman's and Franken's work, I can pronounce that years of therapy are needed for these two residents of Hotel Denial. I daily troll the depths of liberal prose and its loss of a grip on reality, but these two top even Molly Ivins.

The books demonstrate that name-calling and ad hominem attacks are the best liberals have to offer. Alterman calls columnist Robert Novak a "Republican pooper-scooper" and Newt Gingrich a "pot-smoking, draft-dodging, multiply adulterous, deadbeat dad." No footnote offered. Laura Ingraham is "nasty, ignorant and frequently silly."

To Alterman, Robert Bartley, the retired editor of the Wall Street Journal, is "nutty." Ann Coulter is also "nutty." Franken says Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are "nuts" and members of the Christian right are "nutcase evangelicals." Mental illness, per Tipper Gore, is, well, an illness. When hurled about by liberals at conservatives, it is, however, the ultimate insult.

Franken calls Karl Rove "human filth" and Barbara Bush a "b----." The Los Angeles Dodgers are "the most notoriously right-wing team in the history of Major League Baseball." Puzzling! Is it too much Skoal? Driving SUVs to practice?