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Slander?

We always knew Steve Kraske was a raving liberal.

By Mark Kind 

Aryan hottie Ann Coulter, whose political column is syndicated by Kansas City's own Universal press syndicate, bites the media hand that feeds her in this summer's best-selling Slander. The dominatrix of cable-news shoutfests asserts that the media are controlled by liberals.

We read the index. And page 139. That's where local boy Steve Kraske gets accused of being just one more slandering lefty. Thirteen months before Florida Governor Jeb Bush installed Big Brother in the presidency, the charming Kansas City Star political correspondent with a voice for radio and a face for Sunday-morning TV had analyzed George W. Bush's failure of a TV reporter's pop quiz. Dubya hadn't been able to name the popularly elected leader of the world's largest democracy (Atal Bihari Vajpayee, of India), the military strongman who'd overthrown Pakistan's democracy (Pervez Musharraf, whom Bush praised for supposed reforms) or President Aslan Maskhadov of Chechnya.

"Call it an ambush interview," Kraske had written. "Call it unfair, because you can't name the president of Chechnya, either."

That's not the part that Coulter dismissed as the media's "typical exegesis." Instead, she found fault with Kraske's rabidly liberal assertion that the pop quiz raised doubts about "Bush's most glaring weakness" and showed that "the frat boy born with a silver spoon still has something to prove."

When we called him, Kraske hadn't read Coulter's critique. "I glanced at it with my four-year-old son in the bookstore," he tells us. "I'm really not familiar with her work." After being reminded of his frat-boy crack, he said that's about as caustic as his middle-of-the-road column gets. "I definitely have to pull a lot of punches," he admits.

We went looking for more Kraske Commie tripe on the Internet. Kit Bond's Web site features Kraske naming the Republican senator "this column's first Mo-Kan Politician of the Year" last winter. Kraske also showed up at talentforsenate.com, where Jim Talent's supporters had archived his column pointing out that Talent's opponent, Senator Jean Carnahan, isn't "a shoo-in" for re-election. Maybe Bond and Talent will be outed as lefties in Coulter's second edition.