If Ann Coulter were a liberal, it would, of course, have been a “botched joke”. What she meant to say, we would be solemnly assured, is that John Edwards is the kind of zealot who, in the Middle Ages, would have burned his enemies on faggots, but “if you say ‘faggot’ now, you have to go into rehab”.
Luckily, Miss Coulter doesn’t have an MSM bodyguard, so we’ve moved closer to the day when she will stop being invited to events like the Conservative Political Action Conference and conservatives will give up buying her books. When that happens, she will, I imagine, follow Kevin Phillips and James Webb and Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington over to the Angry Left, where she will be much more at home.
There is one point that I believe I can clear up: what connection the Coultermouth discerns between John Edwards and homosexuality. There is a superficial resemblance between the stereotypical soft-spoken Southern male and the stereotypical fa-la-la homosexual. To a New Yorker like Ann Coulter, they are probably indistinguishable and equally distasteful. Her “joke” was just as much anti-Southern as anti-sodomite.
The admirable Captain Ed thinks that this incident is a sign of a Republican “issues with homosexuality”. I’m not sure how. Most of the time, it is leftists who insinuate that their right-wing opponents are “in the closet” and noisily persecute conservatives who happen to be homosexual. The right-of-center reaction to the Edwards-faggot line was, so far as I can see, overwhelmingly negative. One can oppose court-mandated same-sex marriage without liking personal slurs.
Comments