Coulter calls 9/11 widows "witches" (Lying Headline from Reuters)

Reuters via Yahoo! News ^ | June 7, 2006 | Claudia Parsons

[new yorker 77]

Conservative author Ann Coulter sparked a storm on Wednesday after describing a group of September 11 widows who backed the Democratic Party as millionaire "witches" reveling in their status as celebrities.

"I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much," Coulter writes in her book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," published on Tuesday, referring to four women who headed a campaign that resulted in the creation of the September 11 Commission that investigated the hijacked plane attacks.

Coulter wrote that the women were millionaires as a result of compensation settlements and were "reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis."

A spokeswoman for publisher Crown Forum said it had set a first print run of 1 million copies of "Godless" and there were 1.5 million copies of Coulter's previous four books in print.

The four women, Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken, declined to discuss the book in detail but issued a statement saying they had been slandered.

"There was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again," said the statement signed by the four, along with a fifth woman, Monica Gabrielle.

The four women, who live in or around East Brunswick, New Jersey, became friends after September 11 and formed a group that agitated for the investigation. "Our only motivation ever was to make our nation safer," they said.

Coulter, whose books include the bestseller "How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," argues in the new book the women she dubs "the Witches of East Brunswick" wanted to blame President George W. Bush for not preventing the attacks.

She criticized them for making a campaign advertisement for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry in 2004, and added: "By the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy."

PERSONAL ATTACKS

Asked by Reuters why she made such personal comments, Coulter said by e-mail, "I am tired of victims being used as billboards for untenable liberal political beliefs."

"A lot of Americans have been seething over the inanities of these professional victims for some time," she added.

Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg (news, bio, voting record) of New Jersey said Coulter's "shameless attack" on the widows sparked disgust. "Her bookselling antics and accompanying vulgarity deserve our deepest contempt," he said in a statement.

The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News. Corp., slammed the comments in an article on Wednesday headlined: "Righty writer Coulter hurls nasty gibes at 9/11 gals."

Coulter, a regular television commentator who is hugely popular among some conservatives, was challenged on NBC's "Today" show on Tuesday over what host Matt Lauer called "dramatic" remarks, prompting her to say, "You are getting testy with me."

Coulter is known for a combative column after September 11 saying, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." In one book, she wrote, "Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do."

Her latest comments were quoted on radio stations in New York on Wednesday and the book was the subject of debate on Web sites such as www.salon.com. The Daily News newspaper's front-page headline was "Coulter the Cruel."

The controversy appeared to be doing no harm to sales of Coulter's latest book, which was listed as the second-best seller of the day at online retailer Amazon.com on Wednesday afternoon.

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[rodguy911]

Way to go CIC, great job!!!.

[pollyannaish]

I personally think she is better when she is attacking liberal sacred cows in the idea arena, not the personal arena. That is why the converting Muslims to Christianity remark worked, and this doesn't.

IMO, by attacking the health of their personal relationships, she lost an opportunity to attack what they said and how they behave. She could have done that very effectively.

BTW, not only are they no better off than any other moonbat...they ARE moonbats. But that has nothing to do with the state of their marriages. (Please note: the namecalling in my previous statement is commentary on their ideas, not their persons. )

[Non-Sequitur]

Ann's goal was to reveal these women as political hacks for the left, and she did it in a very memorable way.

Coulter's goal was to provide the kind of over-the-top statement that would get people to buy her book and nothing else.

[USS Alaska]

Coulter is an idiot and an embarassment to thinking conservatives.

I am a thinking convervative and am not the least embarassed by Ann Coulter. She speaks the truth and refuses to back down to idiots that call her an idiot.

[rodguy911]

What happens when normal people go to NYC? It must be in the air.

[pollyannaish]

That is a good point, but let me ask you this.

Did those women make those comments, or are those comments made only by the people with who they are allied?

It makes a difference to me.

[pissant]

Yep. And just how the hell did they become experts on preventing terrorism anyway?

[Non-Sequitur]

Do you want to be in a freak show the rest of your life?

Coulter makes a nice living from it.

[pissant]

Thank you sir! Much improved. LOL

[true_blue_texican]

...That nonsense is just baseless slander....

Hey, ahayes, there are baseless slanders and then there are slanders based in hyperbole. These ladies were faaaaarrrrr more focused on Bush and their TV appearences WHERE THEY DID NOT FOCUS on their husbands. Think of George Costanza using his dead fiance to get dates.

[rodguy911]

Absolutely, enough of the one-way street, ann drives down both sides of the street and its unafraid of liberals.(she also guns down drive-bys)

[hocndoc]

The Bible is replete with admonitions to treat widows kindly

Thank you, Palladin, that's what I was trying to remember about the self-proclaimed "911 Widow":

1Ti 5:13 Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not.

[ahayes]

That's silly. You aren't very bright if you think disagreeing with Ann Coulter's venemous rhetoric is equivalent to sympathizing with these widows.

[KJC1]

Hey, I was a writer for 30 years and put plenty down in print I wished I hadn't later on!

What is it they say sh!t happens.

And it's happenin'.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Tacky as hell.

The grieving^TM Jersey Girls and the grieving^TM Cindy Sheehan are of a piece with the grieving^TM Democratic Pep Rally and (oh-by-the-way) Wellstone "memorial."

You wanna talk about tacky? That is tacky. All of it.
And I think that that is exactly Ann's point, dramatically made in the violating of the taboo.

[ahayes]

Both.

[pollyannaish]

You'd be surprised at what people hear and what people don't hear.

And yes, it is really sad. But one of the things I've learned is that the world is what it is. We do not have the bully pulpit even if we control several top positions in government.

Until we can make room for conservative voices in the msm, we have to play differently. It's not fair, but again, it is what it is.

[OldFriend]

If I tell you the truth about NYC, I'll have to kill you.

Let's just say, there are no normal people LIVING in NY. Great place to visit but not to live.

[Howlin]

These women wholly prostituted the empathy granted to them by every decent human being in this country and used it to further a political agenda that was not intended to enhance national security or bring about reform, but was meant to do only one thing: sully Bush and hurt conservatives. This point is irrefutable and sometimes it has to be put bluntly for people to understand.

A Freeper friend of mine corresponded with one of them for a while; I honestly cannot remember whether I did or not, but something makes me think I did.

But I remember reading her replies (and it is one of the ones on Matthews' show) -- they were stunning in their vitriolic claims about Bush; it was as if he and he alone caused the entire thing.

And the most shocking passages left you with only one conclusion: that they believe each and every one of us is at fault because WE didn't stop the airplanes.

Never mind that this woman's husband had been in the building during the 1993 bombing and had walked almost completely down the stairs on 9-11, then heard an announcement that their building was safe, and returned to his office.

Now, I'm thinking to myself, if I had been there in 1993, no way in HELL would I have gone back up, how about you?

I was left thinking that if this issue ever goes away, this woman may, in fact, commit suicide because it has consumed her.

[ishabibble]

Please notice that this criminal act was hardly reported in the MSM.
Lautenburg was applauded. Anne Coulter is being vilified.

The reason Coulter's book is going to be important is that she opens the way for a challenge to the PITY JUNKIES.

McKinney is black. Patches is a druggie. Cindy lost her son.
These "victims" have had the American people by the throat for far too long, and facing up to this now will help us all in the long run. Nobody dares to call one of the above a "messed up loser" but that is what they are...Anne has started a long overdue debate.