Posted on 06/07/2006 4:51:37 PM PDT by 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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Quotes
* "Kristen Breitweiser told Phil Donahue: 'It was clear that we were under attack. Why didn't the Secret Service whisk [Bush] out of that school? ... [H]e is the commander-in-chief of the United States of America, our country was clearly under attack, it was after the second building was hit. I want to know why he sat there for 25 minutes.'" [5] (http://homepage.tinet.ie/~gulufuture/future/breitweiser.htm)
* "It is understandable that so little time is actually devoted to the president's true actions on the morning of 9/11. Because to show the entire 23 minutes from 9:03 to 9:25 a.m., when President Bush, in reality, remained seated and listening to 'second grade story-hour' while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers, would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision." --Kristen Breitweiser's Salon review of Showtime's film "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis" (9/8/2003). [6] (http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2003/09/08/dc911/index_np.html)
* On May 16, 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." [7] (http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_4050.shtml)
* To which Kristen Breitweiser responds:
"How is it possible we have a national security advisor coming out and saying we had no idea they could use planes as weapons when we had FBI records from 1991 stating that this is a possibility?" [8]
There are quite enough true things to shame them with, without needing to make things up.
A "mind-numbingly boring" propaganda film
A 9/11 widow reviews last night's Showtime film about President Bush's actions on and after that fateful morning.
By Kristen Breitweiser
Page 1
September 8, 2003 | The film "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," which premiered Sunday night on Showtime, is a mind-numbingly boring, revisionist, two-hour-long wish list of how 9/11 might have gone if we had real leaders in the current administration. This film is rated half of a fighter jet -- since that is about what we got for our nation's defense on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
http://tinyurl.com/jylg5
You are talking about these four women, I hope. I was standing by the press tables and saw them perform(in the audience) at the 9/11 hearings, and no doubt they are simply political tools dressed in widow weeds. They seemed not to be grieving but taking great please at being the center of attention.
September 24, 2004
KRISTEN BREITWEISER READIES SENATE BID
Kristen Breitweiser, the political activist whose husband was murdered on 9/11, long ago publicly hinted on MSNBC's Hardball that she was interested in running for the Senate from New Jersey.
http://tinyurl.com/hrhhg
Check my posts, you will see I don't support Coulter's over the top remarks. But see them as necessary in the war against liberals.
Then get busy and start doing your part.
Sitting on your rosy red posterior on the sidelines and whining about Coulter's "bad form" when she's doing the heavy lifting is a disgraceful act of cowardice.
Coulter is bashing the left. You should bash the left, not Coulter. Get it?
I do not need to start a perfume factory before I can point out a skunk.
By making controversial statements Ann has brought this whole subject to the forefront all over the country. Hence this thread and others. Everyone is talking about it, and believe me, a whole bunch of those people are saying go for it Ann, tell it like it is. Those "widows" have been at their political game for 5 years now. How long do you get to claim weeping widow status for what you do as your life's work? And it appears these 4 have parlayed their husbands' deaths into careers for themselves.
Fine to choose careers, but not to attack the Prez and Pubs at every term and be raving liberals while hiding behind their widow victim status. The vast majority of widows from 9/11 have not acted in the manner that these 4 have. Now they too are subject to attack for their behavior, thanks to Ann opening up this topic for all to view. All's fair in love, war, and politics. If these 4's husbands knew what their spouses have done by using their deaths to their own financial and political advantage, they might very well have divorced their wives. Doubt if they would be happy with their harpies now.
Wow, I agree with sinkspur on something!
Do I win a prize?
It was the attitude of those on the left that made me turn right in the first place. And I'm far from alone, in fact, there was a recent thread here titled
"Were you ever a liberal or Democrat?"
Many of those responses mirrored mine. It was the outrageous lefty ATTITUDE that first turned many of us around.
I'll take one Sowell for twenty Coulters, any day.
You can check my posts too. She went too far. I have never, anywhere on this thread or elsewhere, suggested those 4 widows are not shills. Ann went too far and it will cost us. I am not a guru, but I have common sense. We need Ann's comments like we need more bicycles for fish.
The liberals LOVE talking about Ann.
You ever wonder why?
Building a house requires many tools. Coulter is a buzzsaw useful for ripping large pieces of raw lumber. If you don't like the sound, plug your ears.
Too bad Thomas Sowell doesn't use over the top rhetoric like Ann.
He just uses facts and thoughtful insight and stuff.
What a LOSER!
(/sarcasm)
They don't "love" talking about her. But they can't help but talk about her because she draws blood every time she takes them to task. They simply can't ignore her or laugh her off like they can you or (for the most part) Sowell.
So do I. In fact, I agree with sinkspur about many things. In this particular case, the three of us are by no means alone:
Although I generally agree with Coulter politically, I absolutely cannot stand her as a human being. I think her caustic, bombastic persona only feeds the fears many non-partisan middle-of-the-road Americans have about conservatives.
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