In those rare moments where I’m actually embarrassed, I have a standard quip that eases the burden: “I’m used to being embarrassed. I’m a black conservative.”

Well, it’s pull-the-paper-bag-down-over-my-head time again, courtesy of Ann Coulter, who for the purposes of this column is Miss Ann Coulter, and I give not a tinker’s dam whether she pardons the pun.

Coulter is the conservative author and columnist who can match wits and words with the best of them. She’s fairly good-looking, but she’s no Halle Berry (More on that later.)

I pondered whether I should pick up Coulter’s latest work — How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) — when I saw it in a local bookstore recently. I’ll have to admit, I hesitated. As a black conservative, I do indeed have trouble talking to liberals. It’s almost as vexing as talking to white conservatives who are totally clueless on the matter of race.

In How To Talk To A Liberal, Coulter unleashes her inner clueless white girl, and lets her run buck wild for well over 300 pages. Oh, it’s not all bad. Her pieces on the 2000 presidential election, and how the U.S. Supreme Court got it right while the Florida Supreme Court got it wrong, are classic. So much for President George W. Bush “stealing” that election.

But on matters of race, Coulter couldn’t get a clue if it pimp slapped her.

“(Halle) Berry successfully mau-maued her way to a Best Actress Award … ” Coulter wrote of Berry’s winning the Oscar in 2002 for Monster’s Ball. Then, after that gratuitous bit of race-baiting, Coulter accused Berry of some race-baiting of her own to win the Oscar when the sultry actress pointed out — correctly — that black actors and actresses still have trouble getting some roles.

You see what’s going on here, don’t you? Coulter had no problem with Denzel Washington winning an Oscar the same year. His was “deserved,” according to Coulter. It was Berry — despite a near unanimous consensus that she did indeed turn in the best performance by an actress that year — who “mau-maued” her way to an Academy Award.

This is nothing but catty hater-ation. What bothers Coulter is not Berry’s “mau-mauing,” but the knowledge that she’ll never even come close to being as fine as Berry is. Memo to Miss Ann: put your claws back in, dear.

Coulter really got buck wild on the issue of the Confederate battle flag, which still bugs a lot of black folks. It doesn’t bug me as much. I’m more concerned that Coulter all but accused Berry of terrorism, probably the better to increase her street cred with the David Duke wing of American conservatives (How this slight escaped those black folks who vigilantly ferret out every offense to the race is beyond me.). But Coulter said enough things wrong in defending the Confederate battle flag that are worthy of correction.

“Man for man,” Coulter wrote, “the Confederate army was the greatest army the world had ever seen.”

That would actually be the Zulus under Shaka, and any military historian worthy of being called one would tell Coulter that.

Southerners fly the Confederate battle flag, Coulter contended, to commemorate their glorious military heritage, not because of racism. But then she slipped and let in a little truth.

“The Ku Klux Klan did not begin using the Confederate flag until the fifties,” Coulter wrote. That’s true, but the total truth is that it wasn’t just the KKK. Southern state legislatures, schools and plenty of non-KKK folks found new love for the Confederate battle flag in the 1950s. If Coulter wanted to be honest, she could have given the precise date.

May 17, 1954.

Yes, the Confederate battle flag flew highly and proudly after the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. Wherever the forces of integration clashed with those of segregation there were good ol’ Bubbas waving the Confederate flag and yelling about how they’d die before they let nigger boys into their schools and rub up against white gals like, well, like Ann Coulter, for example.

That was the battle the neo-Confederates wanted to wage when their precious flag made its reappearance in the 1950s. It would be refreshingly honest if they — and Coulter — would simply admit that.