I do find it to be worthwhile at times to quote Ann Coulter; she's highly intelligent (you don't make Law Review at Michigan Law School and land an 8th Circuit clerkship if you aren't very bright), she's a brilliantly talented polemicist, and she's capable of good journalism when so inclined. When Coulter trains her poison pen on people who genuinely deserve scorn without measure or mercy, it can be something to behold.

But there are reasons why decent people keep a safe distance from embracing Coulter and her work, and this is a particularly nasty example of why:

When their husbands were killed on 9/11, four New Jersey widows tried to find out why - and now no-holds-barred conservative pundit Ann Coulter is mercilessly denouncing them as "witches." "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much," Coulter writes in her new book.

Her brutal words were challenged yesterday on national television by "Today" host Matt Lauer - and she was slammed by the widows she derided as self-absorbed, limelight-seeking "harpies."

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In "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," the uncompromisingly right-wing Coulter writes the Jersey Girls have no right to criticize President Bush or any of the failures that led to the terror attacks.

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis," Coulter writes.

"And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy. . .

"These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them."

WOW. It's not even worth untangling all the pieces of this broadside; this sort of savage attack on people who have suffered a horrible tragedy is beyond any excusing and, really, beyond any apology. Coulter, who was a friend of Barbara Olson (killed on the plane that hit the Pentagon), should know better; heck, any first-grader would know better. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

(It's almost a footnote to this controversy that there are, in fact, legitimate criticisms to be made of this particular band of widows, albeit criticisms that relate more to the media's treatment of them - specifically, that (1) they are just a tiny subset of the families affected by September 11 and should not be treated as if they spoke for all the thousands of others, and (2) they happen to have been partisan Democrats before September 11, and should be identified as such by the media. But Coulter's mean-spirited attack on these women will, perversely, shield them from more sober-minded and humane criticisms.)

Gee, thanks Ann. You speak for nobody but yourself, and that's a poor, shabby excuse for a constituency.