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Furious Ann Coulter Strikes Back
An obviously angry Ann Coulter this morning ripped into critics who deliberately distorted her comments about former senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards.
After a relentless 24-hour firestorm during which much of the mainstream media used selective quotes to mangle the meaning of several of Ann’s comments about Edwards, Coulter set the record straight while talking with Joe Scarborough host of MSNBC’s "Morning Joe” program. Coulter told Scarborough: "I’ve never seen people avoid ideas so much in such an obvious way and try to alert Americans not to read anything, not to listen to something someone said — not because of what someone is saying, but to try to portray her as a Nazi. This happens every time I put a book out and I’m getting a little bored with it . . .”
She further explained that she never wished John Edwards would die. She simply said on "Good Morning America" on June 25 that Bill Maher had wished the death of Vice President Cheney by terrorist attack and got away with it, so perhaps if she wanted to avoid criticism in the future while mentioning Edwards, she should say the same thing. "Oh yeah, I wouldn’t insult gays by comparing them to John Edwards,” Coulter said on "Good Morning America." "That would be mean. But about the same time — you know — Bill Maher was not joking and saying he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack. So I’ve learned my lesson. If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.” The controversy over Coulter's comments heated up when she appeared on Chris Matthews’ "Hardball” show the next day, and was blindsided by a phone call from Edward’s wife Elizabeth. Apparently, the call was pre-arranged by Matthews without Coulter’s knowledge.
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Edwards’ wife told Matthews that she was very offended by Coulter’s interview on "Good Morning America" because Coulter said Edwards’ husband John should be killed by a terrorist attack.
Scarborough asked Coulter on his program, "Why would you say such an awful, awful thing about John Edwards?”
Coulter replied, "That is how it is being reported by the Associated Press, apparently all over NBC, except on your show . . . because liberals lie. I’ve written lots of books about it and this happens to be a good example of it.” Explaining that the terrorist attack comment was in reference to a comment by Bill Maher about wishing Dick Cheney had been killed by terrorists Coulter said, "I described the entire Bill Maher scenario in one sentence. The 'Good Morning America' audience, which is pretty large and pretty broad, [got] the joke, and no one figured out a way to truncate that sentence until 36 hours later. "It’s not like the liberal blogs weren’t, as they always do, watching my appearance and instantly posting, from the moment I walked off 'Good Morning America,' all of their indignation, which apparently centered on my comparing George Bush to FDR because he is great on foreign policy, lousy on domestic policy. "Nobody even thought of how to lie about what I said for 36 hours, so don’t tell me I was giving them ammunition.”
About her comment regarding John Edwards and the word "faggot,” Coulter told Joe, "If you want to go back to CPAC, I was speaking to a group of 7,000 college Republicans and, no, I will not be rearranging my words so the stupidest person in the liberal blogosphere understands what I’m saying.”
Following that "Good Morning America" appearance the Washington Post’s "Reliable Source” gossip column by Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger, omitted the full context of Coulter’s complaint that Bill Maher can get away with saying Dick Cheney should be killed by terrorists.
Wrote the Post, "The conservative shock-pundit, who sniped on ‘Good Morning America’ Monday that she hoped the Democratic candidate would be ‘killed in a terrorist assassination plot,’ was a guest on MSNBC's ‘Hardball’ Tuesday night, prompting a live call-in by Elizabeth, who demanded that Coulter ‘stop the personal attacks,’" according to NewsBusters.
After noting that "If you are going to hate Ann Coulter, hate her for the right reasons,” Scarborough ran the "Good Morning America" clip that started the firestorm. "Some of these wire reports and some of these news shows are deliberately taking this quote out of context,” he said.
Replied Coulter "Yeah, I don’t even know why, or how I have the capacity to be surprised anymore. You can take someone’s words and chop them up and put them together to say ‘Heil Hitler.’ [This is] the media — the mass mainstream media. This isn’t just a few nuts. This isn’t just John Edwards' campaign. This is AP, The Hill and TV . . . I can count the exceptions more quickly than I can count the ones telling the truth.”
Scarborough pointed out that, "You are talking about the Bill Maher incident . . . The part of the Elizabeth Edwards interview that jarred the most people, and jarred me . . . was the part where she brought up that you had written some column where you had made light of John Edwards’ dead son. What’s the story behind that?”
Coulter explained "Needless to say, that is not true, and coming from people who have done what we have just seen them do in the earlier segment, I don’t think they deserve a lot of credibility on this. You can look it up, it’s all over the Web. It’s a fabulous column entitled ‘The Party of Ideas’ written in 2003. I had to go back to get the full gist of the column. It was about all of the Democratic primary opponents.
"And, by the way, listing a quote out of context from a short five minute TV interview is a little quicker to correct than an entire column written four years ago. There is a point to a column . . . Let’s see, I’m the only person in America that has to go back and constantly explain an entire column when it is lied about like this and describe why I chose this adverb, rather than that adverb, and was this a joke, was that a joke . . .
"I am getting a little fed up with being described as the aggressor in these matters . . . it was about the Democratic presidential nominees back then — Gephart, Dean, this guy, the trial lawyer [Edwards] — and how they were not talking about the war, they were not talking about the economy . . .
"They were talking about either they were running for president because they had a dead relative — Vote for me! — or had suddenly discovered a Jewish heritage. In the various dead relative category, that included of course one who wasn’t running but was the one who started it all, Al Gore, in two speeches at the Democratic National Convention.
"Once it was his sister, once it was the near fatal accident of his son, so that it got to the point that all of his family members had to start fearing more runs for higher office. You had Dean’s brother, you had Gephart’s sister or the close death of a child, and then I went through the trial lawyer, a fact that is now memorialized in Bob Shrum’s book who describes John Edwards . . . John Kerry felt queasy about him and almost didn’t put Edwards on the ticket because Edwards kept telling him this tear-jerking story about [how he dedicated his public life to his son]."
Coulter said, "I’m a little sick of being browbeaten by a bunch of harridans about why I chose this word or about why I told that joke . . . and then people turn around and say "you’re so mean, you’re so mean.”
Political analyst Craig Crawford thinks that the Edwards’ attacks on Coulter are part of the Democrats’ efforts to fight back against conservative domination of the talk radio airwaves. He writes on CQPolitics.com that there is a concerted effort by the left to fight back "on several fronts — from challenging their foes on air to endorsing the revival of the Fairness Doctrine, the abandoned federal regulation that once obligated broadcasters to balance the political opinion they air. Behind the scenes, prominent Democratic lawmakers are exploring the idea of more regulation.” As Rush Limbaugh said on his Web site, "Ann Coulter was clearly ambushed” by the Edwards phone call. And if Craig Crawford is correct, we can expect to see more of the same in the future.
Editor's note:
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