Sunday, February 15th, 2004
It will be interesting to see if any talk show hosts, politicians and pundits step back from their embrace of Ann Coulter. Of course she’s always been bombastic, utterly careless about the truth and Olympian in her obnoxiousness - the very things that qualified her for stardom on cable TV talk shows. But you have to think that Chris Matthews or even someone at Fox News might be feeling rumblings somewhere in their lost souls about Coulter’s latest outburst. Here’s what she had to say in her column about triple amputee and former Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who has been campaigning for John Kerry:
Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up… Indeed, if Cleland had dropped a grenade on himself at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. senator in the first place. Maybe he’d be the best pharmacist in Atlanta, but not a U.S. senator. He got into office on the basis of serving in Vietnam and was thrown out for his performance as a senator.
Cleland wore the uniform, he was in Vietnam, and he has shown courage by going on to lead a productive life. But he didn’t “give his limbs for his country,” or leave them “on the battlefield.”
Cleland, I have to say, showed remarkable restraint in his intitial response, saying
I volunteered for a combat mission with the 1st Air Calvary division going into break the siege at Khe Sahn, and if that isn?t a combat mission, you ought to ask some of the people that were there and the 200 guys that were killed in that mission.
And the Republicans say those Democrats are engaging in “gutter politics” for daring to question Bush’s patchy National Guard record…