Consider the Source: Ann Coulter and the other F-Bomb

Ann Coulter only obliquely calls John Edwards a “faggot” so she does’t have to go into rehab, like other people who have said or done shameful things. You remember Michael Richards using the N-word, and Ted Haggard buying drugs and getting a ‘massage’ from a male prostitute, but I doubt that even if Ms. Coulter ran down K-street, screaming, “John Edwards is a flaming faggot!” that she would feel the need to put herself in rehab.

Being provacative is her thing. Just the other day I saw her blathering on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes — it was an accident, honest! — sparring with Darryl Hannah with all the skill of a 3rd-grade schoolyard bully. In other words, she had no cogent argument, she was merely loud and obnoxious. Her argument against Darryl Hannah’s environmental position was this:

COULTER: To say that we can spend less or that we can use candles is not an energy policy.
[...]
DARYL HANNAH: Nobody has mentioned candles but you, Ann, I'm afraid.

If you watch the whole thing, her position is that environmentalists want people, especially poor people, to not use energy at all, thus threatening the survival of humans on this planet.

I think what she is doing is pandering to the fear that people feel about the current state of energy in the US, with so much of it coming from foreign sources and causing global warming. It seems like she’s trying to make people feel good, that ‘we have to have all this energy to survive, so it’s okay that we go to war to get it.’ She does that by attempting to paint environmentalists as elitists who want poor people to not use energy at all, when in fact environmentalists really want everyone (including Al Gore) to use less energy by using it more efficiently. You know, like compact fluorescent bulbs and hybrid cars and solar panels and all those other upcoming and extant technologies that save energy, and most importantly, money.

(Remind me to write something about how I’ve not been in an office building or hotel recently that hasn’t switched completly to CFL because of one reason — the bottom line.)

All of this, I think, is Ann Coulter pandering to the lowest common denominator, maybe not just because she really feels so strongly, but because she needs the attention (that the news outlets and this and other blogs are giving her). So she’ll say anything to get on a camera somwhere.

It’s like she’s the Paris Hilton of political commentary.

Truthdig: Coulter Calls Edwards a “Faggot” at Right-Wing Meeting (with video)
CNN: Coulter under fire for anti-gay slur

Thanks to Truthdig commenter Robin Ruble for the title of this post

Update

Ann totally proved my school-yard bully point by saying this last night on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes:

Faggot isn’t offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays. It’s a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss.’ and unless you’re telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person.

Why’d she even bother to try to defend herself? She doesn’t really care about what she says in the first place, and her defense that “faggot” doesn’t refer to gay people is totaly disingenuous.

So, anyway, Verizon, Sallie-Mae, and NetBank are pulling their ads from her site. At least one newspaper has dropped her column. Unfortunately, her syndicator, Universal Press, seems to be thinking they can just ride it out by saying “she did’t say it in our column, so we have no concern.”

More at the Daily Kos.