'Baiting Ann Coulter'

One of these days, I'll figure out how a person like Debbie Schlussel manages to get dressed in the morning without blowing herself up.

Li'l Debbie hikes up her capri pants and wades into the Elizabeth Edwards/Ann Coulter "feud:"

How do you save your campaign when you're in third place in the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination?

Well, if you're gazillionaire John Edwards and don't want to spend the money you soaked from doctors, you have your wife bait Ann Coulter.

It certainly does the trick, as the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reports:

EDWARDS AND MCCAIN BATTLE to stay in 2008 top tier.

Lagging far behind Obama and Clinton financially, Edwards reaps pick-me-up from jousting with Ann Coulter: $450,000 from 2,300 donors within 24 hours.

That's what the Elizabeth Edwards-manufactured feud with Coulter was all about. Period.

Not that I think Ann minds much. She presumably got to sell more of her latest book, now out in paperback, which is why she was making the media rounds, this week.

Sigh.

Debbie. Dear. If you're going to parrot whatever idiotic right-wing talking point is approved for the controversy of the day, in this case the "feud" between Coulter and the Edwardses, it helps to at least try to apply it to the physical universe in which we live.

Nobody baited Ann Coulter. Ann Coulter baited the Edwardses. She wished out loud for the assasination of John Edwards. This, after she previously exploited the death of their son to score a cheap political point, and called Sen. Edwards' manhood into question in the most juvenile manner imaginable. It was in response to those escalating provocations that Elizabeth Edwards called in to Hardball to suggest that Ann find a better method than "hate speech" to make whatever point she is trying to make. Of course, with a vocabulary limited to little more than hate speech, good ol' Ann was unable to oblige. That's just how shorty rolls.

To say that Ann Coulter was "baited" into making her reprehensible attacks on John Edwards and his family is to be oblivious to the linear nature of the passage of time. Of course, to insist as conservatives do that the earth is only six thousand years old is also to ignore the basic realities of our physical universe, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that you think non-linear storytelling works in real life the same way it does in Quentin Tarantino movies.

At any rate, Ann Coulter picked this fight. It's what she does. Just give the girl her wingnut props and move on.