Raucous laughter filled Stephens Auditorium on Friday night as conservative commentator Ann Coulter continued her sharp attacks on liberal arguments in the realms of foreign and domestic policy.

Coulter spoke for 30 minutes and then took questions from the audience.

Playing the parts of both stand-up comic and political analyst, Coulter said liberal arguments have placed the United States in a position of peril.

“The Democratic Party has established themselves as a group of whistling cowards … which at the end of the day earns them a handshake with Susan Sarandon,” she said. “In wartime, their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.”

On more than one occasion, the controversial author got the crowd of more than 1,000 people to erupt into applause and cheers, including one instance where she derided hecklers in the audience.

“Don’t be a little girl and shout something out and then hide,” she said after asking ISU College Republicans president Louis Kishkunas to do something about the detractors.

The bulk of the speech — part of a tour promoting Coulter’s new book, “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)” — was directed at arguments liberals have made opposing President Bush’s efforts in fighting the war on terror.

Coulter characterized the global effort as removing mosquitoes from a swamp.

“Liberals’ idea to clear out the swamp is to kill each mosquito one by one,” she said.

During her laundry list of charges against liberals, Coulter attacked critics of the government’s treatment of people of Middle Eastern descent living in the United States.

She said the roundup effort, spearheaded by Attorney General John Ashcroft, of Arabs living in the United States illegally after Sept. 11, 2001, was an example of government enforcing laws — something she said liberals were incapable of understanding. The Department of Justice and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service shouldn’t be reined in for doing their jobs, she said.

“The INS and the DOJ are so out of control they have started to enforce U.S. law,” she said. “Some were held so long they had to drop out of flight school all together.”

She said fears of racial profiling were unfounded because many of the threats this country faces today come from the Middle East. Because of previous attacks on American airplanes, she said, it is much more effective to monitor Arabs than to monitor everyone.

“When it becomes 100 percent, it’s no longer racial profiling, it’s a description,” she said.

She attributed such fears to part of what she said is a “civic religion.”

“This isn’t a political party; this is a religious cult,” she said