Ann Coulter has said of the widows of 9/11, nicknamed the Jersey Girls, "These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process." She called them witches and wondered if their husbands were planning to divorce them. Big talk from a small mind.
What's disturbing here is that a lot of pundits on the right are saying she has a point. Her argument is that the left puts out grieving people, like the Jersey Girls or Cindy Sheehan, so that they can hide from criticism behind their loss. I wonder what Coulter would say about this video:
Once again, what's appalling when the left does it is just fine for the right. To counter Cindy Sheehan, the right dug up Debra Johns, who'd lost her son in Iraq, set up a phony grassroots organization called Move America Forward, and put a busload of grieving women on the road with a "You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy" tour. Again, no one had a problem with that.
And, of course, the right has no qualms about digging up the corpses of 9/11 whenever they need to. The most recent example was a confidential email sent by House Majority Leader John Boehner. It mentions 9/11 in the very first sentence, mentions it six more times, and tells republicans that putting the Iraq war in the context of 9/11 is 'imperative'. And, as I've pointed out before, the front page of Scooter Libby's Defense Fund website has only one word before the first mention of 9/11.
Has George W. Bush given a speech on any subject at all since 9/11 without mentioning the event? I doubt it so much that I'm unwilling to check.
Coulter's argument is as much BS as it is false. It isn't the left who's hiding behind tragedy; the Jersey Girls and Cindy Sheehan acted on their own. It's the right who hides behind corpses. During the 2004 election, the argument over Iraq was framed in terms of whether US forces had "died in vain."
Political necrophilia is the province of the right.
--Wisco
