How do you become a “conservative folk hero”? It helps a great deal if you believe, and your fellow right-wingers believe, that liberals are picking on you, contended The Daily Beast’s Ana Marie Cox in a Saturday column.

Cox defined conservative folk heroes as celebrities or demi-celebrities “whose fame is not dependent on a celebrity-generating skill (acting, singing) but on a set of beliefs.” Her examples included the Robertsons from Duck Dynasty; Joe the Plumber; Ben Carson; and the Duggar family.

Their renown, she wrote, is sustained in part by a “network of conferences, straw polls and candidate cattle-calls,” but moreover they “find their credibility increases not via leadership but through victimhood. All criticism by mainstream voices becomes proof of worthiness—and the case of Josh Duggar exposes just how self-defeating the raising up [of] these folk heroes via victimhood can be.”

Ana Marie Cox, the founding editor of the sassy and secular leftist blog Wonkette and now a Washington correspondent for GQ, recently came out of the closet as a -- gasp -- Christian!  Cox’s “coming out” was revealed in The Daily Beast, where she is a contributor.  The article sounds like something written by a recently converted clergyman, rather than a recently converted liberal blogger.

At the Daily Beast, former Rachel Maddow Show guest host Ana Marie Cox reported about her participation in a Minnesota panel organized by Bill Maher to discuss the “worst Congressman in America,” conservative congressman Jon Kline. Cox claimed the event exposed “The no-contest divorce between Republican talking points and reality.”

In addition to the usual liberal list of “antis” applied to conservatives, they’re now anti-breather?

Did you know that white men are good for little more than making crystal meth? And that Americans are proudly belligerent and ignorant? At least according to Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox, as expressed Friday night on "Real Time with Bill Maher" with her formulaic snark.

Cox was a guest on the show, along with GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, actor Rob Lowe and left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi, and talking with them about drug decriminalization when she made the first of two gratuitous swipes, first at American men of pale skin hue, then at Americans in general. (Video, audio after the jump)

MSNBC anchor Alex Witt continued the tradition of liberal media hand-wringing over congressional Republicans on last Sunday’s edition of her eponymous show Weekends with Alex Witt. At the end of a discussion about President Obama’s renewed focus on the economy, Witt erupted against the GOP in a question to Ana Marie Cox of The Guardian:

"What do you think, Ana Marie, how does this president get past the folks who say no on everything, and is there no incentive for the GOP to work with the president on anything ever or do you think the disastrous poll numbers in terms of the congressional approval in this country, if those stay consistent people are going to be like okay, really, we actually do need to get something done because the American public is ticked off?"