Ann Coulter may love comedy more than she hates liberals. I know, because back in the early months of 2001, she and I were friends.

We met in a private internet community called “The Stump,” launched in 2000 by Jay Kogen, who won an Emmy for writing a Frasier episode. The Stump was populated with TV comedy writers and funny actors. It was a free-wheeling conversation space and when Coulter joined, some members of the Stump did not welcome the brash conservative warmly. But I’d read her book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, and agreed with a lot of it. Also, to paraphrase Lou Grant, I like brash.

Coulter didn’t stick around the Stump for long so I reached out to her on my own. We became AOL Instant Messaging buddies for three reasons: (1) she liked that I’d worked on Letterman, The Simpsons, and created the ABC sitcom Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; (2) Coulter was a night owl and her East Coast 2 a.m. was my West Coast 11 p.m.; and (3) I shared a first name with Coulter’s mother.

Coulter posted this when Tim Walz’s Gus melted hearts with his heartfelt love of his father at the Democratic National Convention, deleted it, then offered a non-apology.

Our online chats in the spring of 2001 focused mainly on writing and boys. Coulter was single and looking to date. She even told me about a make-out session she’d recently enjoyed with a writer for The New York Times. (Oh, how times have changed!)

Still, our budding friendship never flowered. That September, al-Qaeda terrorists from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We were all emotional in our responses to that terrifying and deadly attack. But Coulter’s response was........

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