Promoting hate

Ann Coulter, after calling John Edwards a "faggot" at this year's CPAC, was rewarded with an appearance on Good Morning America - a program deemed to be part of the "liberally biased" media by the conservative movement - where she got to offer this oh-so sincere bit of contrition:

"So I've learned my lesson ... If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future I'll just wish he'd been killed in a terrorist assasination plot."

Ha ha, get it? Coulter is saying that "liberals" are hypocrites because "liberals" think jokes about Vice President Cheney being killed by terrorists are funny. Except by "liberals" she means a handful of anonymous commenters at the Huffington Post.

But great job Good Morning America, at giving Coulter a window to further demonize "liberals" and a chance to engage in the favorite response of movement conservative hate-mongers whenever they are called out on some act of bigotry, namely, the "'liberals' do X which is worse" red herring switch-a-roo.

Last summer, I wrote a post at Unclaimed Territory explaining why it was necessary to respond to the likes of Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter. Nothing has changed.

Not too long ago a friend of mine told me she was trying to become more politically informed. To do so, she continued, she had begun reading Ann Coulter's How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Think about that for a moment. This was an individual who did not know much about politics, was a non-ideological independent and the first person she could think of to learn more about politics from was a hate-mongering hack. This should have never happened, because Coulter should have been exposed for the vile, bigoted, intellectually bankrupt propagandist that she is by journalists a long time ago. In this regard, my friend was failed by a mainstream media which is more interested in using Coulter as a figure to drive up ratings than they are in doing their jobs of promoting a responsible national discourse.

It should be noted that the appearance was part of Coulter's promotion tour for the paperback edition of her latest anti-"liberal" hate-mongering book, Godless, the book that inspired my post last summer.

Update: It appears I was both wrong and being too generous to Coulter. As Media Matters makes clear, Coulter wasn't alluding to the comments from Huffington Post, but instead was making up a defamatory lie about Bill Maher.