Ann Coulter calls John Edwards a "faggot"

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MrsSpringsteen said:
This is even more offensive than what Coulter said at that convention.
"How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."
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I think maybe you're reading too much into it. I think he's saying they people of the 8th ward were uneducated about the hurricane and it's effects. I think he's saying the governments at all levels are to be blamed, not the residents. "Failure of citizenship" sounds to me like the people in positions of responsibility (who are citizens) failed the people. I don't think he's being racist here.
 
UberBeaver said:



I think maybe you're reading too much into it. I think he's saying they people of the 8th ward were uneducated about the hurricane and it's effects. I think he's saying the governments at all levels are to be blamed, not the residents. "Failure of citizenship" sounds to me like the people in positions of responsibility (who are citizens) failed the people. I don't think he's being racist here.



interesting ... re-reading, i can see it how you understood it, though i would argue that he's blaming the people of the 9th ward as well as all levels of government, that they are themselves to blame though they may have been failed by society at many levels, which i don't altogether disagree with (everyone is a citizen, not just elected officials).

it does, however, beg the question as to where these people were supposed to go to get out of the way of the hurricane.
 
Why is Howard Stern given a free pass? He's just a vulgar as she is...only more Liberal.
 
First of all, Howard Stern is not liberal. Have you ever listened to his idiotic views?

Second, Howard Stern wasn't speaking at some sort of DNC meeting or something similar. Ann was invited to CPAC, it's something entirely different than a shock jock who has his own show on satellite radio. How are you even missing this?
 
UberBeaver said:



I think maybe you're reading too much into it. I think he's saying they people of the 8th ward were uneducated about the hurricane and it's effects. I think he's saying the governments at all levels are to be blamed, not the residents. "Failure of citizenship" sounds to me like the people in positions of responsibility (who are citizens) failed the people. I don't think he's being racist here.

I see your point insofar as you could say people weren't educated about how to evacuate and all that-but did you read the other speech he gave in 2006 in that link? And even if that is how he meant it, he really needs to clarify that and use other words.

http://www.newt.org/backpage.asp?art=3773

"The last great domestic challenge I think is the fact that we have large structured government institutions that simply don’t work. You saw some of this with what happened in New Orleans and Katrina. The fact is, in Katrina, government failed. The federal government failed. The state of Louisiana failed. The city of New Orleans failed. And for 22,000 citizens in the lower 9th ward, citizenship failed. They literally did not have the education, the training, the habits of responsibility, or the capacity to get out of the way of a hurricane."

Habits of responsibility? Capacity? :eyebrow: Knowing what I know about Newt, it all strikes me as a bunch of codewords and it sounds a certain way to me. Racist undertones at least even if you don't want to label it overtly racist. Those lazy, irresponsible, poor black folk with some sort of "diminished capacity"? Citizenship means citizens to me, not the people who were supposed to get them out of there.
 
AEON said:
Why is Howard Stern given a free pass? He's just a vulgar as she is...only more Liberal.

well,

if the Democrats invite him to be a guest speaker with all their Presidential Candidates and he calls Clarence Thomas or Condi the N word. I think we would hear about it.


a few weeks back Obama said lives have been "wasted" in Iraq.

He had to immediately apologize, and he did.


and then McCain goes on Letterman to announce he will be a Candidate and he says the same damn thing while on Letterman.:huh:

Yes, he did apologize.

He changed it to "sacrificed."
 
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anyway, back on track ... i suppose what i'm disappointed with, in ALL the candidates, is here is a perfect opportunity to acknolwedge the discrimination that gays and lesbians face every day, yet no one has yet to say the word "gay" in relation to Ms. Coulter's slur.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:

... it all strikes me as a bunch of codewords and it sounds a certain way to me. Racist undertones at least even if you don't want to label it overtly racist. Those lazy, irresponsible, poor black folk with some sort of "diminished capacity"? Citizenship means citizens to me, not the people who were supposed to get them out of there.

That's it. I think politicians, journos, commentators and the like who hedge around things and vague their way out of any one point piss me off more than someone who's forthright with their view - whether it be blatantly offensive or not. There's plenty of good words in the English language. No need to dick around. A spade is a spade.
 
Why can’t we all just ignore Ann Coulter?
By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald Columnist
Tuesday, March 6, 2007

I am not supposed to write about Ann Coulter. That makes me part of the problem, not the solution, which is to ignore her.
How can I?
This Friday, as you probably know, she outraged both left and many on the right by describing would-be president John Edwards as a “faggot,” an awful word.
And almost immediately speculation began, as it does every time she utters some outrage: Is this the final straw, the beginning of the end for Ann Coulter?
No, it’s not, of course.
Why not? That’s my excuse today: to answer that question.
A “huckster of hate,” detractors have called her. And telebimbo, skank, lying liar, Twiggy with Tourettes living on Chardonnay and cigarettes, or Nicorette. “A drag queen fascist impersonator,” says writer Andrew Sullivan.
Born in la-de-da New Cannan, Conn., educated at Cornell and Michigan law school. Coulter was a former legal adviser to Paula Jones in her sex-harassment case against Bill Clinton, whom Coulter loathes.
In black miniskirt and mink stole she once reportedly made out in a stairwell with Bob Guccione Jr., son of the porn mogul. She’s been engaged at least three times, never married, endured scary stalkers. “She’s a pterodactyl version of Anna Nicole Smith,” said somebody yesterday, “with a much bigger brain and much smaller breasts. And you can’t look away, partly because every time she says something nutty, she’s all over cable, like Anna.”
She rakes in $20,000 to $30,000, or more, for every speech or interview where she says things like:
Democrats are “the treason party.“ Or “We ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning. Boom!”
Or, some 9/11 widows are “witches” and “grief-arazzis;” Ted Kennedy’s “a human dirigible;” Katie Couric’s “the affable Eva Braun of morning TV.”On gays, before the “faggot” remark, “How can you teach children about anal sex in a loving way?”
MSNBC fired her after she called Pamela Harriman, the late ambassador to France, a whore - as MSNBC was covering her memorial service.
“She’s my hero.” deadpanned local PR czar George Regan. “No resume. No idea what she’s talking about. But she’s got the best gig in America, raking in millions.”
But why, why?
Yesterday I read everything I could about Ann Coulter, America’s most recognized, written, blogged, talked about conservative polemicist.
My theories: When you see her on TV, she’s hard to turn away from. As Time magazine once put it, “it’s almost impossible to watch her and not be sluiced into rage or elation.” She’s both an example of the coarsening culture and of how we talk politics on TV and radio now: the more polarizing, furious, outrageous and even violent the soundbite; the more it provokes, enrages - and gets you invited back on the show - the better.
And then there’s the Coulter femme fatale factor. What you notice in so many interviews is how she charms reporters, makes them like her and then think to themselves: Well, maybe it’s not so bad that she, you know, wants to deport Arab immigrants, legal, or not. People on the left, like Michael Moore, say awful things, too.
Several Coulter stories talk about her attending power parties in New York or D.C. filled with hot shot journalists or political operatives. At first they’re appalled that she’s there. But then they line up to talk to her. And suddenly they’re drooling, groveling, star-struck groupies, especially the men. So if she were a thick-waisted dowdy brunette, nobody would care what she said. But she’s not, so we do.
 
i suppose i just wish people would not only focus on what a waste of time Coulter is, but also on the word and why it hurts and what it means.

seems like a good teachable moment.
 
Well we've discussed over and over again in FYM why the word hurts and what it means, and so many people say it is just a word. So at this point personally I've given up on the possibility of any teachable moments.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
Well we've discussed over and over again in FYM why the word hurts and what it means, and so many people say it is just a word. So at this point personally I've given up on the possibility of any teachable moments.



i agree that happens in FYM, i just wish a politician would be brave enough to make this a national teaching moment.
 
Andrew Sullivan wrote this

"I watched Ann Coulter last night in the gayest way I could. I was on a stairmaster at a gym, slack-jawed at her proud defense of calling someone a "faggot" on the same stage as presidential candidates and as an icon of today's conservative movement. The way in which Fox News and Sean Hannity and, even more repulsively, Pat Cadell, shilled for her was a new low for Fox, I think - and for what remains of decent conservatism. "We're all friends here," Hannity chuckled at the end. Yes, they were. And no faggots were on the show to defend themselves. That's fair and balanced.

I'm not going to breathe more oxygen into this story except to say a couple of things that need saying. Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it's worth addressing. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn't homophobic. It was, in her words, a "school-yard taunt," directed at a straight man, meaning a "wuss" and a "sissy". Why would gays care? She is "pro-gay," after all. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into "reparative therapy" to "cure" them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her.

Her defense, however, is that she was making a joke, not speaking a slur. Her logic suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. They're not. And when you unpack Coulter's joke, you see she does both. Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a "faggot." She's absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. insanity. She could have made a joke about that - a better one, to be sure - but a joke. But she didn't just do that. She added to the joke a slur: "John Edwards is a faggot." That's why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised. To put it simply, either conservatism is happy to be associated with that atmosphere, or it isn't. I think the response so far suggests that the conservative elites don't want to go there, but the base has already been there for a very long time. (That's why this affair is so revealing, because it is showing which elites want to pander to bigots, and which do not.)

Coulter's defense of the slur is that it was directed at an obviously straight man and so could not be a real slur. The premise of this argument is that the word faggot is only used to describe gay men and is only effective and derogatory when used against a gay man. But it isn't. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The word "faggot" is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form. She knew why Edwards qualified. He's pretty, he has flowing locks, he's young-looking. He is exactly the kind of straight guy who is targeted as a "faggot" by his straight peers. This, Ms Coulter, is real social policing by speech. And that's what she was doing: trying to delegitimize and feminize a man by calling him a faggot. It happens every day. It's how insecure or bigoted straight men police their world to keep the homos out.

And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men - and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth. You want to meet someone with balls? Find a drag queen. The courage of many gay men every day in facing down hatred and scorn and derision to live lives of dignity and integrity is not a sign of being a wuss or somehow weak. We have as much and maybe more courage than many - because we have had to acquire it to survive. And that is especially true of gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight - the very people Coulter seeks to demonize. The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.

Secondly, gay men are not all effeminate. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a soldier come out to tell their stories. I'd like to hear Coulter tell Amaechi and Alva that they are sissies and wusses. A man in uniform who just lost a leg for his country is a sissy? The first American solider to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss? What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men "boys"? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that's what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said - and conservatives applauded - that I and so many others are not men. We are men, Ann.

As members of other minorities have been forced to say in the past: I am not a faggot. I am a man."
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
But it isn't. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The word "faggot" is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form.
 
This is what a reader wrote to Andrew Sullivan about what I posted above



"Thank you, Andrew, for that post. I will testify to you about the bravest man I ever knew.

My brother, eleven years older than me, my godfather, was a semi-nelly queen from rural southeast Texas, where we grew up. Talk about steel. There, especially then, you take your life in your hands if you're queer and honest about it. Far more likely you grow up closeted and hating yourself. Well, my brother didn't hate himself, but plenty of people down there did. And somehow, in the face of hate, he displayed understanding and equanimity. How he managed understanding was sometimes beyond me. Like your friends, Andrew, my brother had more strength and courage and grace than Hannity and Coulter put together. He died of AIDS, Christmas 1994. He lived long enough to have several fatal diseases - Kaposi's, pneumocystis carinii, etc. - by the time he died. He lived his illness without bitterness, complaint, or regret. He planned his death, from the hospice to the urn, so as not to be a burden to our parents or to his brothers or friends. All the while offering comfort to his friends who were sicker, cooking meals, driving to appointments, enforcing medical regimes.

I've never seen someone so kind to the nurses and doctors attending him.
"I'm sorry, I look horrible," he said to the doctor at his last appointment.
"Do you feel like you're dying?" his doctor asked.
"Yes. Is that okay?"

He faced eternity with peace and wisdom and a great good humor that I continue to find simply stunning. I am not prone to experiencing profound revelations. But his death was just that to me. And this, of course, says nothing about who my brother was apart from his disease.

My brother was not a faggot. He was a man."
 
I've said it before and I'll say it again. What makes Coulter so despicable is the absolute cynicism with which she peddles her garbage.

I just read a column by her today. . part of it anyway. . .before I gave up in disgust and it was just so ridiculously ludicrous--this over-the-top global-warming-is-a-crock spiel that you knew she didn't really believe it.

I guarantee with her it's all about the money at the end of the day.

Can there be anything worse than a person who has no convictions that spouts the ugliest kind of "conviction" as means of making a buck?

Disgusting.
 
Someone preferbly a drag queen needs to scream this in her face next time she shows her skanky head on TV!

"Now listen here, you mullet. Why don't you just light your tampon, blow your box apart? Because it's the only bang you're ever gonna get, sweetheart!"

This is my fav quote of all time.....Bernadette(Drag queen) from Priscilla Queen of the dessert!
 
Well comments like that are only sinking to her level. I would never defend Ann Coulter, but I do defend her against certain types of sexist remarks that have nothing to do with what she is saying. Her looks, her sex life, etc. Apparently some guys think she's gorgeous too. A matter of personal taste that I don't understand, but I do think that her looks have helped her get away with many things in her life-just a hunch. It's easy to attack her in that way but it's not necessary or all that productive. And how often are men attacked in that way? Not as often, for sure.

And another missed teachable moment-the NAACP just gave an image award to Isaiah Washington, who called his gay coworker a faggot :slant:
 
in context, it's not really the same thing, as in some random crass insult. actually, given the context, she'd be the same as the character it was spoken to in that a man in a dress would still be a classier woman than she will ever be.
 
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