When slime crosses the line

I remember being flabbergasted when ESPN hired Rush Limbaugh to serve as an NFL studio analyst. He may have been a football fan but surely there were more qualified people to serve as analysts. The sole reason they hired him is because they wanted someone to 'liven things up' in the booth.

Yet when he made a controversial politically-tinged comment about Donovan McNabb, there was a big flap and ESPN fired him. I remember thinking how idiotic ESPN was. They hired him to be an obnoxious loudmouth and when he did exactly what he was hired to do, they gave him the axe. I have no love lost for the admitted drug addict but ESPN was hypocritcal. When they hired him, not only did they know he had foot-in-mouth disease, that's the single reason they hired him!

I thought of this during the recent Ann Coulter flap. As you may know by now, she called Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards a faggot. I'm not going to comment on her actual remark because there are certain people that just aren't worth getting upset about. And if anyone exemplifies that kind of person it's Coulter. It's the reaction that intrigued me.

Her slur provoked a virulent reaction from liberal opponents, which is exactly what she wanted. This provoked a hyperventilating counterreaction by conservative defenders of the avowed McCarthyist. It was the usual overblown back and forth. I found the whole thing dull and typical.

Ann Coulter embodies everything that's wrong with how political 'debate' is conducted in this country. She's not fundamentally different than Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore or their ilk; she just has better hair and a shriller voice.

Bear in mind, being rabidly incoherent is her niche. It's her bread and butter. Her whole appeal is to frothing-at-the-mouth readers. She never convinces anyone undecided. She just throws red meat to the partisans and makes a lot of money that way. She's not in the least persuasive, but she's a good businesswoman.

What amuses me about the latest flap is that what she said is really par for the course for her. This is a woman who's written books with titles like, "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism," "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right" and "How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)."

If you look at titles like this and expect something with the wisdom of Socrates and the tolerance of Gandhi, you'd have to be delusional.

So in the wake of her 'faggot' comment, at least half a dozen papers have dropped Coulter's rantings.

Again, I don't have any warm feelings for a woman who embodies the worst in America, but what sense does this make? Why did these papers even pick up her column in the first place? I'm sure there are conservative columnists out there who appeal to readers with a double (and maybe even triple) digit IQ and all their rabies shots.

Her 'faggot' comment is really just as empty and hardly much more nasty than her usual drivel. Them dropping her columns because of this comment is like ESPN firing Limbaugh: both were simply doing what the organizations in question hired them to do.

According to these newspapers, it was no big deal for Coulter to call all liberals 'traitors.'

It was ok for her to say, 'Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do.'

It was ok for her to refer to the Democratic gathering as 'the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston.'

It was ok for her to say, 'My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building' (this from a woman who insisted that while 'not all Muslims were terrorists, all terrorists were Muslims.')

It was ok for her to decrying 9/11 widows as 'people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.'

It was ok for her to say 'If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.'

It was ok for her to say of Muslims, 'We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.'

It was ok for her to say, 'When we were fighting communism, OK, they had mass murderers and gulags, but they were white men and they were sane. Now we're up against absolutely insane savages.'

All that stuff was ok, or at least tolerable, according to these newspapers. But using an infantile schoolyard taunt against John Edwards... now THAT is crossing the line!