Back when I was young and innocent, I completed a NewsMax survey (hey, they said that the President and Congress wanted my opinion), and so now I get daily NewsMax spam. Today’s was titled “Liberals Trash Ann Coulter.”

And for a change, I was actually interested in the subject, because last night I happened to catch the part of “Scarborough Country” that featured Ann as a guest, and I thought that she looked trashed. (She couldn’t recall the name of the liberal she was supposed to be debating; she couldn’t stop smirking at her “humorous” line, “All the Democrats give us to talk about are ex-Klanners and nuts,” and, most tellingly of all, she agreed to be a guest on a segment devoted to denouncing somebody for using hateful rhetoric.)

So, I opened the email. It turned out to be a list of NewsMax headlines, plus links to the stories.

And the story about Ann turned out to be a rehash of the Washington Post’s “Reliable Sources item about a “Name Ann Coulter’s Next Book” contest — but NewsMax did add a few wingnutty touches of their own to keep it from being direct plagiarism.

Here, let’s read from it together:

Liberals Hold ‘Name Coulter’s Book’ Contest

A “Name Ann Coulter’s Next Book” contest launched by campusprogress.org, a fledging liberal Web site and offshoot of the slightly crazed Center for American Progress, challenged students to come up with appropriate titles.

Yes, NewsMax added the “slightly crazed” descriptor.

According to the Web site, the rules for the contest were simple: The book title had to be the same format as Coulter�€™s books �€” a single word followed by an explanatory subtitle, as in Coulter’s “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.”

According to the Washington Post’s Reliable Sources columnist Richard Leiby, about 150 people entered the contest. The winning entry was “Roosevelt: Wheelchair-Riding, America-Hating Terrorist,” submitted by Ryan Sniatecki, 26, of Baltimore. His prize: The official Ann Coulter talking action figure.

Hey, good title, Ryan!

I don’t have anything nearly as good, but here are a few titles I came up with off the top of my head:

* Projection: Using the Taunt “I Know You Are, But What Am I” as the Basis of a Lucrative Career on In Wingnuttery

* Suckers: How a Male High School Drop-Out Conned the Right Into Believing He Was an Attractive, Intelligent, Female Lawyer/ Pundit by Wearing Short Skirts and Making Bigoted Remarks

* Noel: How Liberals Stole, Raped, and Murdered Christmas as Part of Their Plot to Destroy Civilization and Aid Terrorism and Communism

But let’s get back to NewsMax for the runners-up from CampusProgress.com

Runners-up included:

“Help: I’m Out of Liberal People, Places and Organizations to Hate.”

“Pander: How Character Assassination and Name-Calling Will Make You Popular and Rich.”

“Democracy: The Liberal Plot to Feed Your Children to the Poor.”

“Ann: Doesn’t Eat, Shoots, and Never Leaves.” (A reference to Coulter’s lithe frame and a play on an old dirty joke which we cannot repeat here.)

Leiby just said that the last title was a reference to “Coulter’s thin physique,” evidently assuming that everyone would already know that it’s also a play on the title of the best-selling grammar book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. (But now NewsMax has me all thinking of old dirty jokes that involve “shooting,” and imaging Ann Coulter in them — and I don’t appreciate it one bit!)

Asked for comments on the contest results, Ann told Leiby, “Well, at least now they’re trying to be funny, a welcome change from all the vomiting and fainting after the election season.”

She offered a few entries of her own:

“Tuesdays With Morons”

“The Five People You Meet in Line at the Welfare Office”

“It Takes a Village to Raise a Kid With A.D.H.D., Rage Issues, and an Eating Disorder”

“Their Eyes Were Watching God and Banning Him From Public Schools”

“The Dan Rather Code”

“He’s Just Not That Into Jews: The George Soros Story”

Ha ha, what a wit that Ann is!

See, at a Jewish forum in New York City, Soros reportedly attributed a recent resurgence of anti-Semitism to the policies of Israel and the United States, and to successful Jews such as himself.

But I imagine that Ann never actually read Soros’s comments, probably just getting her information about Soros from Tony Blankley, who said that Soros “blamed the Jews for anti-Semitism.” (Because just a few days later, when Ann was on “Hannity and Colmes,” she also said the same thing, proving that mediocre minds think alike, and get the same talking points from the GOP.)

And I bet that Ann really smirked after coming up with her Soros book title, too.

P.S.

The reason Scarborough gave for making a big deal about Byrd’s Nazi comparison (and for reading some of the racist remarks Byrd made in the 1940s) was that if the Democrats retook the Senate, “In an age of terrorism, Byrd come be third in line for the presidency.” And hey, we’d certainly never want a President with skeletons in his past that he’s said he’s sorry for now, and who has indirectly compared his opponents to Nazis, for instance, in an ad on his campaign website. Because, in an age of terrorism, it would be scary to have such a jerk in the White House.