Elizabeth Edwards Smacks Down Ann Coulter

[Note: If you can't talk about this without referring to Ann Coulter as a tranny or otherwise making fun of her appearance, don't comment at all. 1. This is a safe space, and maligning Coulter by calling her a tranny is to suggest there's something inherently wrong with being transgendered/transsexual. That is not an assertion that is welcome in Shakesville. 2. The very issue that Edwards is talking about is hate speech. Two things discussed in the segment are Coulter calling John Edwards a "faggot" and referring to Hillary Clinton's "chubby legs." If you call Coulter a tranny or make fun of her appearance, how are you any better than she is? Just a friendly but firm reminder, as this has already come up in comments discussing this story.]

Go get her, Elizabeth.



Think Progress has the transcript. More at TPM Cafe.
Coulter really is a soulless beast, that she can sit there and say to the mother of the dead child, with regard to whom she once wrote that John Edwards drives around with a bumper sticker reading "Ask me about my son’s death in a horrific car accident," with a flippancy typically reserved for spoiled teens still certain of their invincibility, "This is now three years ago." Yeah, what a humorless feminazi Elizabeth Edwards is that she can't, after three long years, find the awesome humor in a joke about her dead son.

The game that Coulter is playing is completely typical of the defenders of hate speech, as well (and that goes for defenders of hate speech on either side of the aisle). Any suggestion that hate speech masks real issues that need our attention, or that there's nothing gained by being deliberately hurtful to individuals or whole groups forged by shared identity, is translated into "Censorship!" Coulter immediately takes Edwards' request that she not utilize hate speech and turns it into "The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking." Pathetic.

And, by the way, I'd like to point out to the vapors-getting, pearl-clutching, fainting couch-residing arbiters of civil discourse who haunt TIME's Swampland and the opinion pages of various black-and-white-and-read-all-overs that Ann Coulter never once used "the f-word" during her tirade against John Edwards' career as an attorney representing people like a little girl who had her insides ripped out by a defective pool drain. So huzzah for civil discourse!

Dipshits.