What’s so funny about suggesting someone should be murdered? I don’t laugh at such jokes. I find them not only tasteless in the extreme, but morally reprehensible. In fact, I don’t know anyone who thinks jokes about killing people are funny.
Yet, Ann Coulter, “controversial” conservative columnist must think it’s freaking hilarious, considering how often she publicly advocates for the death of liberals, progressives and Democrats. Here’s her latest, a real riot of a joke about how someone should poison Justice Stevens of the Supreme Court:
Universal Press Syndicate columnist Ann Coulter “joked” during a Thursday speech that liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned. “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” Coulter said at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”
She made other “off-color” jokes about liberal Supreme Court justices that made the audience “squeal,” according to an article today in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Other off color jokes? And this woman is a purported Christian?
Isn’t it time to end Coulter’s 15 minutes of fame?
If this were a one time “slip” by Coulter, and she had expressed even a smidgen of remorse, one could perhaps forgive her the nastiness of her rhetoric. Unfortunately, she’s made a career out of calling, praying or wishing for the death and dismemberment of her political opponents, Muslims and anyone else who offends her. From Media Matters:
October 2004: Two days after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Coulter wrote about Muslims: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” She was fired from the right-wing National Review Online in late 2001 for this comment. Since then, she has not changed her position: In her new book, How to Talk to a Liberal, she wrote: “I am often asked if I still think we should invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever!”
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August 26, 2002: On Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
From The Nation (article by Eric Alterman):
What I do mean is to point out the incredible hypocrisy of those on the right, the center and the “liberal media” who defend the lunatic ravings of Ann Coulter, whether because she is “kidding” or because “the left does the same thing.” (For those who have been lucky enough to have missed the Coultergeist of the past few months, the author of the summer’s number-one bestselling nonfiction book in America has–in language identical to that above–expressed her regret that Timothy McVeigh did not blow up the New York Times building, mused aloud whether Bill Clinton should have been impeached or murdered, and called for the execution of John Walker Lindh in order to intimidate liberals.)
More from Media Matters:
LINDA VESTER (host): You say you’d rather not talk to liberals at all?
COULTER: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days. [FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester, 10/6]
Another Classic Coulter moment:
LAWRENCE KUDLOW (host): We got a couple of seconds before the break when you guys are all going to come back, but, Ann, I just want to give you first whack at this. Eason Jordan, top news executive at CNN — I mean, to me, this is absolutely incredible — this guy says at a big conference in Davos that the U.S. military is deliberately targeting and assassinating American journalists. Huh? He still has a job, huh? You got a take on that?
COULTER: Would that it were so!
KUDLOW: Would what were so?
COULTER: That the American military were targeting journalists.
Well, you get the picture.
Yet this woman appears regularly on Fox News, MsNBC, radio talk shows and as a paid speaker at campuses across the country to spew this vile mixture of eliminationism and hate. And the people she’s talking about taking a baseball bat to are me and you, and my son, my daughter and your children.
We should start a campaign to boycott the sponsors of any television or radio show which has her as a guest.
And if I were the Democrats (DNC, DCCC and DSCC) I would make her the face of the Republican Party in every campaign commercial in every race this Fall, and I’d have our candidates demanding at every opportunity that Republicans running for office denounce her openly and publicly.
I’d be on Hardball and the Situation Room and Scarborough Country and Anderson Cooper every damn day screaming over and over that every Republican office holder, and the RNC, need to denounce Coulter and her murderous rhetoric, one that has no place in our politics. I’d keep repeating it until the White House Press Corp had Scotty spinning like a top at his daily briefings, until reporters shouted it out at President Bush’s public appearances, until every cable news program was covering the story.
Because we need to say: Enough is enough! People who joke about murder don’t deserve to have a public career in mass media, broadcast or print. Ann Coulter doesn’t deserve to have a career as a pundit of mendacity and bile. It’s time she was taken down. I know it’s not just her, but we need to start somewhere, and she’s as good a target as anyone else on the right that demonizes and despises progressives and liberals.
Calling Al Gore, John Kerry and Howard Dean. I have a new project for you guys to take on when the filibuster fight is over. Because its time to go on offense for a change. We’ve been put on the defensive long enough.
