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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Ann doesn't sit back and she doesn't remain quiet. She calls it exactly as she sees it. The 9/11 widows are glory-rolling in their husbands' ashes to advance the liberal cause and undermine the War on Terror. Everybody knows it. Only Coulter has the courage to say it.
To borrow the words of Harry S Truman, a tolerable Democrat from an earlier era: Coulter doesn't tell liberals to go to hell, she tells them the truth and they think it's hell.
Might backfire on them this time, Murtha could backfire as well.
Probably ... but they lost, anyway :-).
She is a bitter woman who is selfish enough to try to represent those other family members who detest her as she works as a political hack / media whore.
Sometimes you have to get down in the gutter with your adversary.
Even though in their hearts they fully agree with her.
Agreed.
Ann Coulter is a private citizen. Why should she need a public official to defend her when she expresses an opinion some find unacceptable?
Dittos
If the MSM doesn't quit being so vicious to Ms. Coulter, I'm going to have to buy one of her books.
Hmmm...
Oh wait---it's #2 at Amazon? Well then...never mind!
(Full disclosure: I like AC, really. It's just that she cultivates the liberals' image of her, they frighten their young with AC quotes and probably slip them into apples on Halloween, and if they quit doing that, she won't continue to appear on tv so often, or sell so very many books. Besides, she's fast approaching a state of self-parody.)
From the sounds of the cries from the left, I would say Ann scored a direct hit.
You can always tell when a hypocritcal liberal cause is exposed for the lie it is by how loud the left cries........
And people in hell want ice water?
What do you think "their government and elected officials" could do that would satisfy them?
Coulter writes a book trashing Godless liberals (implying that she is God-filled), then makes these hateful remarks about these women.
Coulter is using God in the same way Robert Tilton uses God: to pad her pockets.
For sure!
Doesn't Ann have an editor? The screed against the widows should have been deleted before publication. It was in very bad taste.
Coulter is striking a nerve with bitter liberals and conservative posers.
Ann went about it the wrong way. She went down into the abyss.
I'll go as far as saying she screwed up her intended message entirely and completely by coating it in inappropriate, no-class vitriol. She did a disservice in a grand way.
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