A Top Five this week is two versions of a single four-year-old reality.

Before she went off about “perfecting the Jews” this week, Ann Crazy Coulter described heaven as something “like New York City during the 2004 Republican national convention… People were happy, they were christian, they were tolerant.”

Coulter said “New York City” but she wasn’t talking about the city at all. She was referring to the people who were smiling and clapping in the paradise of the convention hall while their security forces attempted to “perfect” the jews and other rabble in the wilds beyond the police tape.

Our intrepid contributor Hanna Ingber Win was one of those thousands of unperfecteds. As she recounted here in a recent column, she joined the weekly New York City Critical Mass bike ride that Friday, 27 August, only to be arrested with hundreds of other riders and illegally detained for more than 24 hours. She asked a policeman how to get around the clogged traffic. She was then cuffed and thrown with others into a bus and carted to Pier 57, aka “Guantanamo on the Hudson,” where she was mocked and officially charged with no crime. Instead she was told that she had been arrested for protesting and was laughed at when she asked to make a phone call.

That’s the kind of happy Christian tolerance we can expect in Ann Coulter’s America and in the harp-strewn police state she imagines as the afterlife. Coulter’s nonsense is more than shock punditry. She articulates a shared political fantasy that requires the same kind of off-stage oppression as did her beloved convention. Her tolerance doesn’t include the kind of true American diversity that demands acceptance of difference or, god forbid, change. In her world, as she makes clear in the YouTube above, black or brown christian megachurch attendees represent diversity. That’s racist bullshit. That’s her imagining that toleration means “accepting” the same kind of person (a christian republican) in merely a different kind of skin. All she’s tolerating is the fact that they’re not white.

Coulter’s happy and tolerant America is the same as Bush’s liberated and democratic Iraq: a lethal combination (for others) of wishful thinking and blind fantasy! Her New York is a convention center. His Iraq is the Green Zone.