In her book, Coulter writes that ever since Rush Limbaugh and Fox News Channel broke the monopoly on the news and the floodgates opened, the leftist media and the Democrats have been trying "to re-create a world where they can hurl slander and treason without anyone arguing back –- they needed a doctrine of infallibility” that would prevent critics from answering back, leaving their fallacious doctrines unchallenged.
"They would choose only messengers whom we’re not allowed to reply to,” she writes. "That’s why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing hysterical women. You can’t respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering.”
Among them, Coulter writes, are "people with "absolute moral authority” in the words of Maureen Dowd describing Cindy Sheehan -- Democrats with a dead husband, a dead child, a wife who works at the CIA, a war record, a terminal illness or as a last resort being on a first-name basis with Nelson Mandela.”
And so we get the likes of the "Jersey Girls" exploiting the deaths of their husbands on 9/11, Sheehan exploiting the death in Iraq of her son to attack President Bush, Joe Wilson, Rep. John Murtha and other untouchables. To challenge their assertions is blasphemy and "over the line.” And an assault on the "sacred.”
In her book Coulter writes of all of the above unchallengeable messengers, but the liberals in the media have focused on one group -– the Jersey Girls -– four New Jersey 9/11 windows who have blatantly exploited the deaths of their husbands exactly as Sheehan has exploited the heroic death of her son -– to castigate the president and his administration, and become lionized millionaires in the process.
And, just as Coulter has written, she has been lambasted by the media and such liberal Democrats as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for daring to attack their untouchable spokeswomen
The Jersey Girls - Kristen Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg, Lorie Van Auken and Patty Casazza – "scarcely representative of the hundreds of 9/11 widows” as Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, are, being widows, allegedly exempt from being criticized, not for their widowhood, but for their exploitation of it for the crassest of political motives.
The four, three of whose husbands worked for the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, first attracted attention when they came together to complain that the average settlement of $1.6 million the government was planning to pay 9/11 victims' families was not enough.
After succeeding in getting their payments increased they began attacking Bush for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks. They demanded the establishment of a commission to explain why the government had not prevented the attack. From the beginning their target was never the hijackers who murdered 3,000 people, including their husbands, but the Bush administration.
They cut commercials for Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, launched vicious attacks on Condoleezza Rice and leapt to the defense of Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton administration Justice Department official who had erected the so-called "wall” that prevented intelligence agents from sharing information with law enforcement agents about suspected terrorists in the U.S.
Two years ago, long before Coulter focused on the Jersey Girls, the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote about their "venerable status”
"Who, listening to them, would not be struck by the fact that all their fury and accusation is aimed not at the killers who snuffed out their husbands' and so many other lives, but at the American president, his administration, and an ever wider assortment of targets including the Air Force, the Port Authority, the City of New York?” she asked. "In the public pronouncements of the Jersey Girls we find, indeed, hardly a jot of accusatory rage at the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. We have, on the other hand, more than a few declarations like that of Ms. Breitweiser, announcing that "President Bush and his workers ... were the individuals that failed my husband and the 3,000 people that day."
"The venerable status accorded this group of widows comes as no surprise given our times, an age quick to confer both celebrity and authority on those who have suffered. As the experience of the Jersey Girls shows, that authority isn't necessarily limited to matters moral or spiritual. All that the widows have had to say -- including wisdom mind-numbingly obvious, or obviously false and irrelevant--on the failures of this or that government agency, on derelictions of duty they charged to the president, the vice president, the national security adviser, Norad and the rest, has been received by most of the media and members of Congress with utmost wonder and admiration. They had become prosecutors and investigators, unearthing clues and connections related to 9/11, with, we're regularly informed, unrivalled dedication and skill.”
And untouchable, as Coulter has charged.
As Coulter said in a TV interview Saturday night, the media has portrayed her comments about the Jersey Girls as an attack on all 9/11 widows. This, she explained, is "specifically about four women who have turned themselves into political activists against the President, defending Bill Clinton, [and] attacking Condoleeza Rice ...”
Coulter went on to explain that her chapter was about liberal infallibility and how they "keep sending up these human shields to make pure partisan political points. Like Cindy Sheehan, like the Jersey Girls ...”
Coulter explained that in the chapter "I have a whole slew -- plenty of other examples of the use of human shields ... sending out spokesmen we can’t respond to.”
NBC's Brian Williams saw Coulter’s criticism of the Jersey Girls as crossing the line. In introducing the segment on Coulter’s remarks, Williams said, "just when you think that it seems that there are no limits on anything, someone comes along and makes a comment that goes over the line -- the line that is shared by just about everybody because some things are, it turns out, still sacred.”
And there you have it. The politicized Jersey Girls represent something "sacred.” They must not be criticized -- to do so is to challenge the Liberal Doctrine of Infallibility. They are the sacred cows who immunize the indefensible liberal insanities and slanders of the Democratic Left from scrutiny, solely by virtue of their massively exploited widowhood.
Just as Coulter said.
Is is a very interesting observation, and this is the fisrt time I have understood it. So, thanks.