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As a rocket-mouthed firebrand of the Republican right, Ann Coulter built her reputation on denouncing Democrats and liberals with as much venom and savagery as she could muster.

Revelling in her reputation as the Mistress of Malice, Coulter's controversial views and their scattergun delivery found a perfect platform in the age of 24-hour cable TV and an internet connection in almost every home.

'She epitomises the way politics is now discussed on the airwaves, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible,' Time magazine said.

But even the most extreme of conservatives would baulk at publicly calling a political opponent a 'faggot'.

In levelling the anti-gay slur at former US vice-presidential candidate John Edwards at a conference in Washington last week, the right-wing pundit and best-selling author crossed the line, many experts say. She now faces an uphill battle to salvage a reputation that might have been holed below the waterline.

'She'll take a hit on this,' said  Terry Madonna, head of Franklin and Marshall College's Centre for Politics and Public Affairs in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

'I don't think it will significantly derail her career in the long term, but it did her damage and, for now, she becomes someone to avoid.'

To that end, outraged advertisers are racing each other to desert her self-aggrandising website, anncoulter.com; no political weblog worth its name has been without a sizeable number of bloggers braying for Ms Coulter's blood, and at least three newspapers around the US have dropped her as a syndicated columnist.

'We will not continue to publish the columns of someone who uses people as a punch line to get a cheap laugh and who so freely uses an offensive term to describe another human being,' said Stan Voit, editor of Tennessee's Mountain Press newspaper, which dumped Ms Coulter in a fiery editorial.

Another editor, Allan Adler of the Oakland Press, said his decision was not a hard one to make. 'When we picked up Ann Coulter, it was because we felt we needed a conservative columnist and we knew she had a following,' he said. 'She certainly no longer represents conservatism and apparently is more interested in being a celebrity.'

Those who know Ms Coulter, 45, say that being a celebrity is something she excels at. With her long, blonde hair and passion for leather miniskirts, she broke the mould for deep-thinking political commentators and soon became a favourite with network TV producers who were convinced that her captivating appearance and razor-sharp tongue were the magic combination to draw in the viewers.

Critics, however, denounced her as a 'telebimbo' and she was twice fired for comments she made on MSNBC, for whom she became a contracted pundit when it was still a fledgling network in 1996.

This, after all, is the woman who offended much of America with her attack on a group of 'self-obsessed' 9/11 widows in her 2006 book Godless, The Church of Liberalism. 'I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much,' she wrote. Democratic Party Senator Hillary Clinton suggested the book should instead have been titled 'Heartless'.

Other controversial remarks attributed to her include calling Muslims 'camel jockeys' and stating the US would be a better country if women were not allowed to vote.

Yet if the furore over her 'faggot' outburst at the Conservative Political Action Conference has further damaged her reputation, it has had the effect of elevating her name in the headlines. Oscar Wilde wrote that: 'There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.' Ms Coulter, whose five anti-liberal books have all appeared at the top of The New York Times best-sellers' list, would doubtless agree.

'Ann Coulter is an entertainer,' Professor Madonna said. 'She's made millions selling books. She can write, and many times her arguments about liberals are spot on. There's a kernel of truth in many of the things she says, and she says things that a lot of conservatives believe.

'But mainstream Republicans would shy away from the rhetoric she uses. Middle-of-the-road conservatives back away and don't want to be associated with it.'

Neither, it seems, do the three leading Republicans vying for the party's nomination for the 2008 presidential election, including Mitt Romney, who introduced Ms Coulter as a speaker at the Washington conference. Ms Coulter told delegates: 'I was going to have a few comments on Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot'.' She later refused to apologise, insisting her 'joke' was not an attack on gays but simply a 'taunt' against Mr Edwards that was misunderstood.

Republican frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani said 'there should be no place for such name-calling in political debate'; Mr Romney considered her remarks 'offensive' and John McCain, the only one of the three not at the conference, said they were 'wildly inappropriate'.

Their condemnation comes as no surprise. But it raises the question of who Ann Coulter is and, perhaps more intriguingly, how she rose to a status where three such Republican heavyweights felt compelled to distance themselves from her words for fear of the damage it could cause them.

Born in December 1961 into what she describes as an 'upper middle-class' family in New York, with a lawyer as her father, she studied at Cornell University and earned a law degree from the University of Michigan. She also trained as a journalist. She practised law for a private firm in New York City before her talent and quick wit were recognised in Republican Party circles. She moved to Capitol Hill and a job working for Michigan senator Spencer Abraham and the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994, advising on crime and immigration.

Two years later, her individual brand of in-your-face punditry first appeared on MSNBC, and 'Coulter Culture' was born. Even after her sacking in 1997, allegedly for telling a Vietnam veteran on air that it was people like him who had led the US to lose the war, her stock continued to rise. She is still seen regularly on Fox News and CNN, and charges up to US$50,000 for an after-dinner-speaking engagement.

According to Professor Madonna, there is nothing new in the aggressive way in which Ms Coulter plies her trade. 'You could go back in history to the age of broadsides, single sheets of paper that were handed out in the street and brutal in terms of what they printed,' he said.

'When Andrew Jackson was elected in 1828 they accused him of being an adulterer, and his wife an adulteress. The only difference today is that Ann Coulter has a much wider audience.'

She is also devoutly religious, with strong anti-abortion views that she likes to expound publicly and a deep-seated belief that the ideas of liberalism and Christianity are mutually exclusive. 'I'm a Christian first and a mean-spirited bigoted conservative second,' she once said.

Repentance, though, is one Christian virtue she has not shown over the Edwards controversy, telling political talk-show host Sean Hannity this week that she did not need Mr Giuliani and his fellow candidates to speak for her as the 2008 election approached.

'Apparently, our top three Republican nominees aren't that smart,' she said. 'And if they're going to start apologising for everything I say, they better keep that statement handy, 'cause there's going to be a lot more in the next year.'



Furore over 'faggot' slur sees  Mistress of Malice in top form