REALLY? Where's her burkha!?
Just damn.
If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
Posted on 03/01/2005 5:51:11 PM PST by tgslTakoma
WASHINGTON, 2 March 2005 — Arab bashing reached a new low in Washington last week when Ann Coulter, a loudmouthed, mean-spirited, pro-Bush columnist, decided to defend the White House press pass controversy over faux-reporter James Guckert (a.k.a. Jeff Gannon) by writing in her syndicated column: “Press passes can’t be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.”
Thomas, whose Hearst column is distributed by King Features Syndicate, is of Lebanese descent. The former United Press International reporter has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, and has covered every president since John F. Kennedy. She was the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association.
Even her syndicators realized the gaffe. When Coulter’s column was posted on Universal Press Syndicate’s (UPS) website, someone edited out the race-based slur “that old Arab Helen Thomas,” using instead: “that dyspeptic, old Helen Thomas.”
But the “old Arab” reference still appears the column posted on Coulter’s website: www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi.
Coulter was, perhaps, taking a cue from the White House, which has slighted Thomas several times since 2003. During a televised news conference, President George W. Bush deliberately snubbed several reporters he ordinarily calls upon, including journalists from the Washington Post, Newsweek, and USA Today. But the most conspicuous recipient of the Bush freeze-out was Thomas, who has barbed and grilled every president since Kennedy and almost always gets to ask a question. Bush pointedly ignored her.
Bush then dealt Thomas a second slight. By custom, Thomas concludes White House press conferences at the president’s signal by saying, “Thank you, Mr. President.” Bush instead ended the conference with his own sign off, “Thank you for your questions,” and killed a decades-old White House custom. Lastly, she was removed from her front row seat, and delegated to a back seat in the press choir.
Is this treatment due to the fact that Thomas has been critical of the Bush administration? She has condemned the terror-fighting Patriot Act and slammed Bush’s domestic and international policies. She also called the Iraq war “a violation of international policy under any circumstance,” and said it is “immoral.”
But she has never been known to mince her words to any president.
There has been disappointingly little reaction in defense of their colleague by White House journalists.
In an article entitled “Lipstick Fascism,” James Wolcott, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, writes: “I wonder what would happen if a writer, say me, were to refer in a Vanity Fair column to ‘that old Jew Norman Podhoretz’ or, naughtier still, ‘that old Jewess Lucianne Goldberg.’
“Through the magic of exaggeration, I can just imagine the commotion. Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz would blow their respective lids...petitions would file in to Vanity Fair demanding that I be fired, or, for penance, be forced to tour Auschwitz with Prince Harry.
“Arabs of course are fair game on talk radio and the trash punditry, of which Ann Coulter is stringbean queen,” says Wolcott. “Presumably Helen Thomas’s very ancestry, about which I know nothing, makes her an incipient terrorist threat, though presumably commando call boy Jeff Gannon would have been coiled to pounce into action if the octogenarian made any sudden violent moves. Coulter’s typically crass wisecrack is the cartoonish version of the hostile profiling of Arabs and Muslims being conducted all over the neoconservative right, as typified by Michelle Malkin’s pioneer work to excuse the Japanese internment in order to justify the preemptive incarceration of Muslims and other suspicious elements.
“I’m sure this sort of thing doesn’t fluster them in the slightest. Conservatism and sadism have become indivisible,” writes Wolcott.
Just like you can't call someone a "bum", "tramp", "wino" or "hobo" anymore. Now, it's an ill-clothed, underhoused, non-employment-seeking, fermented beverage consumer...
Yeah, but prisoner transport vehicles are still called "Paddy Wagons."
I still can't figure out which ethnic/racial/religious/socio-economic descriptors are A-OK and which ones aren't.
Given the fact we're basing the State Department's new office of Anti-Semitism commissars on events that occured in Petersburg and France and an inscrutable Easterner's ejaculation ... yeah, I guess you could say I think the wolf-crying is not only "widespread" but strangely institutionalized, thanks to Bush's initiative.
Curiouser and curiouser ... these "strict Constitutionalist" conservatives.
New Law Requires Report on Global Anti-Semitism
President Bush on October 16 signed into law the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 which establishes a State Department Office to monitor anti-Semitism around the world. The Act passed with strong backing from Congress, but opposition from the State Department itself, which objected to reports on different religions or ethnicities separate form the global human rights report and religious freedom reports that the Department prepares annually.
President Bush affirmed that, in the context of spreading democracy abroad, “extending freedom also means confronting the evil of anti-Semitism.” He pledged that the U.S. would “keep watch” and “make sure that the ancient impulse of anti-Semitism never finds a home in the modern world.”
The bill requires the State Department to document acts of physical violence against Jews, their property, cemeteries and places of worship abroad, as well as government responses to such acts.
Among the attacks that prompted passage of the bill, the sponsors mentioned the burning of a Jewish synagogue in Toulon, France, last March, the desecration of about 50 Jewish gravestones in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February, and the recent claim by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad that Jews "rule the world by proxy."
NCSJ President Joel Schindler praised the bill’s passage, saying that Congress "has now provided new avenues" for combating anti--Semitism around the world.
In September, more than 100 prominent Americans sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsing the measure. "The fight against anti-Semitism deserves specific, focused attention," said the letter signed by Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, former Republican Rep. Jack Kemp and others.
(Whaaa ? Jack Kemp is a "former Republican"? Didn't he run as Vice President last time they sent Bob "Down Boy" Dole up the flagpole to "send a message.")
You can almost hear Gramsci screech: "Piece of cake ... I told you so!!"
(Which reminds me that there is far better reading among the links of this article than ever shall appear in the comments (or the text) of an Ann Coulter thread. Oh for the days of True signal:noise)
Regards, Dog
'Another few threads like this and I may bail on this place.'
I'll start searching. Don't forget your opus.
"former Republican Rep."
REALLY? Where's her burkha!?
Just damn.
If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
Knock yourself out, dude.
Oh man, she should wear one... permanently.
Are these two related?
Schwew ...
A glut of "former Democrats" is one thing ... I guess Kemp's turning coat like some Log Cabin sort would be more obvious, even, than nominating Dole for President.
=)
=== I still can't figure out which ethnic/racial/religious/socio-economic descriptors are A-OK and which ones aren't.
I suspect the State Department's new Office of Anti-Semitism stands ready to assist confused taxpayers such as yourself on precisely which Hate or Thought Crimes are, and are not, actionable.
Your tax dollars at word, Comrade! We are living right!
I noticed that last week...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1349749/posts?page=315#315
What do I win? ;)
LOL! That's great!
Helen's got more wrinkles than an elephants scrotum.
bump and thanks!
And claim religious basis to kill people of other faiths or to rape 10 year old girls and boys..
regards,
DX
Dubya probably WISHES she would shut up, but she isn't taking cues from anyone.
It's a crime to say Arab now ? WTH ?
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