Our splendider-than-splendid 20th MISCiversary hullabaloo commences at 8 p.m. in the downstairs “Grotto” room of the Rendezvous, on Second Avenue between Battery and Bell in formerly-quiet Belltown.

INSTEAD OF REVIEWING Jay Leno’s non-starter of a segment with wingnut crashing-bore Ann Coulter, I’ll comment on Coulter’s Ally McBeal-esque rail-thinness. I’ve seldom if ever commented on a female celebrity’s physical appearance, but in this case Coulter’s countenance might be a key to her mindset.

Last week at a First Thursday art opening, my fellow Belltown Messenger scribe Gillian Gaar told me she thought Coulter looked anorexic. I don’t remember everything Gaar told me, but she essentially suggested Coulter was treating herself with the same judgmental cruelty she uses on non-Bushbots. I responded that I’d known right-wingers who were vegetarians, not for moral reasons but for the sake of personal perfection.

The shrinks and the self-help authors claim many anorexics are propelled by an obsession with attaining perfect beauty, and/or an obsession with an ethereal transcendence that both denies and overcomes the limitations of bodily existence.

I’ve known only one ex-anorexic personally. This woman, who’s doing much better these days, said that at the time she felt disgusted at the idea of putting anything into her body. You could call it the ultimate chastity, and it’s another kind of perfection-obsession.

Coulter, overtly, markets herself as a proud provocateur, a daring rebel, a valiant warrior. I happen to view her as none of these, but rather as a pompous bully, an insult comic who forgot to be funny. She’s like the screechingly pathetic MSNBC incarnation of Dennis Miller, without Miller’s wordplay or comic timing.

But back to her self-image. She clearly thrives on hate, both giving and receiving. She publicly treats criticism as proof of her greatness, just before she spouts another “joke” advocating her opponents’ violent murder. It’d be easy for an armchair psychologist to interpret Coulter’s emaciated physique as a sign that she gets off on punishing herself as much as she gets off on bashing anybody who doesn’t worship Bush. In BDSM lingo, that’s mean she was a dominatrix who’s also her own submissive.

But other intrepretations could also be in play. One can imagine Coulter rigorously maintaining the visual appearance of a brittle li’l waif, to make her verbal brutality seem somehow more “against type” and therefore more “truthful.”

But it still doesn’t work. Coulter just comes off as a spoiled princess, an upscale snot crassly harping about anyone poorer or less refined than herself. She’s no crusader; she’s just a schmuck.

Note: Neither Leno nor his other guest, George Carlin, made any serious attempt to call Coulter on her BS. But at the show’s end, musical guest KT Tunstall appeared with an acoustic guitar festooned with Woody Guthrie’s old slogan, “This Machine Kills Fascists.”