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Columnist Ann Coulter "has a book to promote this week," as ABC's Jake Tapper (subscription required) put it, showing us the cover of her Godless but not deigning to mention it by name. Accordingly Coulter appeared on ABC's Good Morning America from which NBC's David Gregory ran her incendiary soundbite pledging to desist from insinuating that one of the Democratic Presidential candidates is gay: "If I am going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I will just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."
ABC's Tapper ran a C-SPAN clip that gave background to Coulter's Edwards-baiting: "You have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot so I am kind of at an impasse. I cannot really talk about Edwards." He also cited a Coulter column where she accused Edwards of exploiting a family tragedy to gain sympathy with the joke that Edwards' bumper sticker reads Ask Me About My Son's Death in an Horrific Car Accident.
So bad blood already existed when Coulter's book tour reached Hardball on MSNBC. While the columnist was taking questions from anchor Chris Matthews, the candidate's wife Elizabeth called in to decry Coulter's "hatefulness and ugliness." Said Elizabeth: "We cannot have a debate if you are using this kind of language." Replied Ann: "I think we have heard all we need to hear. The wife of a Presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking." Coulter said she would not: "No!" The Edwards Campaign publicized the spat in a fundraising e-mail by the candidate's wife, asking for Coulter Cash.
Neither Tapper nor Gregory chose to take sides. NBC's Gregory saw a "calculated effort to confront Coulter" and generalized that the entire episode is a "reminder of what so many Americans so dislike about politics." ABC's Tapper noted that "Edwards has a fundraising deadline--enemies can have their uses."
Please. Both Tapper and Gregory are being mealy mouthed here. Admittedly the Edwards Campaign frittered away some of its moral high ground when it raised money by bragging as a badge of honor that it has Coulter as an enemy. As crass as that may be, Edwards still has every right to express her resentment when she hears her husband gay-baited, teased in his bereavement and wished dead at the hands of terrorist assassins. And Coulter has no excuse to talk like that.
UPDATE: at the conservative NewsBusters.org, Brad Wilmouth (text link) reprimands NBC's Gregory for taking Coulter's Good Morning America quote out of context. The full quote, Wilmouth demonstrates, consisted of Coulter defending herself for making faggot jokes about Edwards on the ground that they are less offensive than HBO comedian Bill Maher having assassination fantasies about Vice President Dick Cheney. Coulter declared that she would cause less offense by fantasizing about Edwards' assassination than about his sexual orientation. The fact that Gregory quoted the latter rather than the former proves her wrong--but it still does not justify Gregory's misrepresenting her point.
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