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Ann Hart Coulter (born December 8, 1961) is an American conservative political commentator, syndicated columnist, and best-selling author. She frequently appears on television, radio and as a speaker at public and private events. Known for her controversial and confrontational style, Coulter has described herself as a polemicist who likes to "stir up the pot" and, unlike broadcasters, does not "pretend to be impartial or balanced."
Early lifeAnn Hart Coulter was born to John Vincent Coulter, an Attorney for Phelps Dodge and wife (married at Stuyvesant, New York, September 30, 1953) Nell Husbands Martin. After her birth in New York City, New York, the family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Coulter and her two older brothers, James and John, were raised.
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Timeline
Quotations
We'll drive off the side of that bridge when we come to it, Senator Kennedy.
How to Talk to a Liberal (2004); ISBN 1400054184 p. 147
I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.
Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.
Her syndicated column, September 28, 2001
The presumption of innocence only means you don't go right to jail.
Would that it were so! ... That the American military were targeting journalists.
We were terrified that Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president.
Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story (1998), pg. 183
Encyclopedia
Ann Hart Coulter (born December 8, 1961) is an American conservative political commentator, syndicated columnist, and best-selling author. She frequently appears on television, radio and as a speaker at public and private events. Known for her controversial and confrontational style, Coulter has described herself as a polemicist who likes to "stir up the pot" and, unlike broadcasters, does not "pretend to be impartial or balanced."
Early lifeAnn Hart Coulter was born to John Vincent Coulter, an Attorney for Phelps Dodge and wife (married at Stuyvesant, New York, September 30, 1953) Nell Husbands Martin. After her birth in New York City, New York, the family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Coulter and her two older brothers, James and John, were raised. She has described her family as "upper middle class" and has termed her attorney father a "union buster". He was a nine-year FBI agent who worked on the William Remington espionage case and, later as a labor lawyer was involved in defeating a 1983-1985 strike by the United Steelworkers against the Phelps Dodge copper company that ended with 30 locals being decertified.
As an undergraduate at Cornell University, Coulter helped found The Cornell Review, and was a member of the Delta Gamma national women's fraternity. She graduated cum laude from Cornell in 1984, and received her law degree from the University of Michigan Law School, where she achieved membership in the Order of the Coif and was an editor of the Michigan Law Review. At Michigan, Coulter founded a local chapter of the Federalist Society and was trained at the National Journalism Center.
After law school, Coulter served as a law clerk, in Kansas City, for Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. After a short time working in New York City in private practice, where she specialized in corporate law, Coulter left to work for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee after the Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994. She handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan and helped craft legislation designed to expedite the deportation of aliens convicted of felonies. She later became a litigator with the Center for Individual Rights.
Personal life Coulter has been engaged several times, but never married. She has dated Spin founder and publisher Bob Guccione, Jr., and conservative writer Dinesh D'Souza. In October 2007, she began dating Andrew Stein, the former president of the New York City Council, a liberal Democrat. When asked about the relationship, Stein told the paper, "She's attacked a lot of my friends, but what can I say, opposites attract!" On January 7, 2008, however, Stein told the New York Post that the relationship was over, citing irreconcilable differences.
Coulter owns both a condominium in Manhattan and a house, bought in 2005, in Palm Beach, Florida. Although she says that usually she lives in New York, she votes in Palm Beach and is not registered to do so in New York. She is a fan of the Grateful Dead, and some of her favorite books include The Bible, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, true crime stories about serial killers and anything by Dave Barry.
Coulter's column on January 9, 2008 was about the recent death of her father, John Vincent Coulter.
Media career Known for her polemical style, Coulter has been described by The Observer as, "the Republican Michael Moore" and "Rush Limbaugh in a miniskirt."
Television and radioCoulter made her first national media appearance in 1996 after she was hired by MSNBC as a legal correspondent. Time said this about her tenure there:
The network dismissed her at least twice: first in February 1997, after she insulted the late Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to France, even as the network was covering her somber memorial service.... Even so, the network missed Coulter's jousting and quickly rehired her.
Eight months later, Coulter's relationship with MSNBC ended permanently after she tangled with a disabled Vietnam veteran on the air. Robert Muller, co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, asserted that "in 90 percent of the cases that U.S. soldiers got blown up [in Vietnam] — Ann, are you listening? — they were our own mines." (Muller was misquoting a 1969 Pentagon report that found that 90 percent of the components used in enemy mines came from U.S. duds and refuse). Coulter averted her eyes and responded sarcastically: "No wonder you guys lost."
The Washington Post and others misquoted Coulter saying: "People like you caused us to lose that war." After MSNBC, she began appearing on CNN and the Fox News Channel.
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post made a point to respond to the Time article to explain that his widely quoted reporting of Coulter's reply to the veteran in an article he wrote had its origin in Coulter's own later recollection of the incident. Describing his previous story, Kurtz added, "I did note that, according to Coulter, the vet was appearing by satellite, and she didn't know he was disabled."
Coulter has made frequent guest appearances on many television and radio talk shows, including The Today Show, Hannity and Colmes, The O'Reilly Factor, American Morning, Crossfire, Real Time with Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, The Fifth Estate, The Sean Hannity Show, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and Mike Gallagher.
In 2005, Coulter appeared as one of a three-person judging panel in The Greatest American, a four-part interactive television program for the Discovery Channel hosted by Matt Lauer. Starting with 100 nominees, each week interactive viewer voting eliminated candidates.
Films In 2004, Coulter appeared in three films. The first was Feeding the Beast, a made-for-television documentary on the "24-Hour News Revolution". The other two films were FahrenHYPE 9/11, a direct to video documentary intended to rebut Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, and
Is It True What They Say About Ann?, a documentary on Coulter containing clips of interviews and speeches.
In 2006, Coulter refused permission to include a scene featuring herself and Al Franken in a debate in Connecticut in Franken's film, .
Books Coulter is the author of six books, all of which have appeared on New York Times Best Seller list.
Coulter's first book, (ISBN 0-89526-113-8), was published by Regnery Publishing in 1998. The book details Coulter's case for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Coulter's second book, (ISBN 1-4000-4661-0), published by Crown Forum in 2002, remained number one on The New York Times Best Seller list for seven weeks. In Slander, Coulter argues that President George W. Bush was given unfair negative media coverage.
In Coulter's third book, (ISBN 1-4000-5030-8), also published by Crown Forum, Coulter reexamines the 60-year history of the Cold War — including the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Whittaker Chambers–Alger Hiss affair, and Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" — and argues that liberals were wrong in their Cold War political analyses and policy decisions, and that McCarthy was correct about Soviet agents working for the U.S. government. She also argues that the correct identification of Annie Lee Moss, among others, as Communists was misreported by that liberal media. Treason was published in 2003, and spent 13 weeks on the Best Seller list.
Crown Forum published a collection of Coulter's columns in 2004 as her fourth book, (ISBN 1-4000-5418-4).
Coulter's fifth book, published by Crown Forum in 2006, is (ISBN 1-4000-5420-6). Coulter argues, first, that liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, and second, that it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. Godless debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Coulter's most recent book, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans, was published in October, 2007.
Columns In the late 1990s, Coulter's weekly (biweekly from 1999-2000) syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate began appearing. Her column is featured on six conservative websites: Human Events Online, WorldNetDaily, Townhall.com, FrontPageMag, Jewish World Review and her own website. Her syndicator says, "Ann's client newspapers stick with her because she has a loyal fan base of conservative readers who look forward to reading her columns in their local newspapers." Her column on her personal website, anncoulter.com, is also permanently linked to by the Drudge Report web page.
In 1999, Coulter worked as a regular columnist for George magazine. Coulter also wrote exclusive weekly columns between 1998 and 2003 and with occasional columns thereafter for the conservative magazine Human Events. In her columns for the magazine, she discusses judicial rulings, Constitutional issues, and legal matters affecting Congress and the executive branch.
Overall, Coulter's columns are highly critical of liberals and Democrats. In one, she wrote:
This year's Democratic plan for the future is another inane sound bite designed to trick American voters into trusting them with national security.
To wit, they're claiming there is no connection between the war on terror and the war in Iraq, and while they're all for the war against terror — absolutely in favor of that war — they are adamantly opposed to the Iraq war. You know, the war where the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as "Iraqi civilians", even if they are from Jordan, like the now-dead leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). That war.
Reactions from publishers In 2001, as a contributing editor and syndicated columnist for National Review Online (NRO), Coulter was asked by editors to make changes to a piece written after the September 11 attacks. On the national television show Politically Incorrect, Coulter accused NRO of censorship and said that she was paid $5 per article. NRO dropped her column and terminated her editorship. Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of NRO, said, "We did not 'fire' Ann for what she wrote... we ended the relationship because she behaved with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty [concerning the editing disagreement]."
Coulter contracted with USA Today to cover the 2004 Democratic National Convention. She wrote one article that began, "Here at the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston..." and referred to some unspecified female attendees as "corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons." The newspaper declined to print the article citing an editing dispute over "basic weaknesses in clarity and readability that we found unacceptable." An explanatory article by the paper went on to say "Coulter told the online edition of Editor & Publisher magazine that USA Today doesn't like my "tone", humor, sarcasm, etc., which raises the intriguing question of why they hired me to write for them.'" USA Today replaced Coulter with Goldberg, and Coulter published it instead on her website.
In August 2005, the Arizona Daily Star dropped Coulter's syndicated column citing reader complaints that "Many readers find her shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives."
In July 2006, some newspapers replaced Coulter's column with those of other conservative columnists following the publication of her fourth book, . After the Augusta Chronicle dropped her column, newspaper editor Michael Ryan explained that "it came to the point where she was the issue rather than what she was writing about." Ryan also stated that "Pulling Ann Coulter's column hurts; she's one of the clearest thinkers around."
Public appearances Coulter is a frequent public speaker, particularly on college campuses, receiving both praise and protest. During an appearance at the University of Arizona, a pie was thrown at her.Coulter has, on occasion, responded with insulting remarks towards hecklers and protestors who attend her speeches.
Religious views Coulter says that she holds Christian beliefs, but has not declared her membership in any particular denomination; she has mentioned that her father was Catholic while her mother was not.
At one public lecture she said: "I don't care about anything else: Christ died for my sins and nothing else matters." In a 2004 column, she summarized her view of Christianity: "Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it." She then mocked "the message of Jesus ... according to liberals," summarising it as "...something along the lines of 'be nice to people'," which, in turn, she said "is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity".
Confronting some critics' views that her content and style of writing is un-Christian, Coulter has stated that "I'm a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it." She has also said: "... Christianity fuels everything I write. Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy — you know, all the virtues in the church of liberalism." In , as well as in personal appearances, Coulter characterized the theory of evolution as "bogus science", and contrasting her beliefs to what she called the left's "obsession with Darwinism and the Darwinian view of the world, which replaces sanctification of life with sanctification of sex and death."
On October 8, 2007, Coulter ignited yet more controversy when she was quoted as saying that Jews should be "perfected" into Christians. She was talking about Republicans with Donny Deutsch, a Jewish CNBC talk-show host, and implied that she considered Christianity a virtue. Deutsch asked her, "It would be better if we were all Christian?", to which Coulter replied "Yes". Deutsch asked her, "We should all be Christian?", and got the same response, with an invitation to come to church. Later on, Coulter said, "we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say", saying that this was what Christianity was, and she compared the 'New Testament to Federal Express. Further, Coulter said that Christians considered themselves to be perfected Jews. Deutsch implied that this was an anti-Semitic remark, but Coulter said she didn't consider it to be a hateful comment.
Political activities Coulter's political activities have included advising a plaintiff suing President Bill Clinton and considering a run for Congress.
The Paula Jones – Bill Clinton case Coulter debuted as a public figure shortly before becoming an unpaid legal advisor for the attorneys representing Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. Coulter's friend George Conway had been asked to assist Jones' attorneys, and shortly afterward Coulter, who wrote a column about the Paula Jones case for Human Events, was also asked to help; she began writing legal briefs for the case.
Coulter later stated that she would come to mistrust the motives of Jones' head lawyer, Joseph Cammaratta, who by August or September 1997 was advising Jones that her case was weak and to settle, if a favorable settlement could be negotiated. From the onset, Jones had sought an apology from Clinton at least as eagerly as she sought a settlement. However, in a later interview Coulter recounted that she herself had believed that the case was strong, and that a settlement would give the impression that Jones was merely interested in extorting money from the President.
David Daley, who wrote the interview piece for the Hartford Courant recounted what followed:
Coulter played one particularly key role in keeping the Jones case alive. In Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff's new book Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story, Coulter is unmasked as the one who leaked word of Clinton's "distinguishing characteristic" — his reportedly bent penis that Jones said she could recognize and describe — to the news media. Her hope was to foster mistrust between the Clinton and Jones camps and forestall a settlement...
- "I thought if I leaked the distinguishing characteristic it would show bad faith in negotiations. [Clinton lawyer] Bob Bennett would think Jones had leaked it. Cammaratta would know he himself hadn't leaked it and would get mad at Bennett. It might stall negotiations enough for me to get through to [Jones adviser] Susan Carpenter-McMillan to tell her that I thought settling would hurt Paula, that this would ruin her reputation, and that there were other lawyers working for her. Then 36 hours later, she returned my phone call.
- "I just wanted to help Paula. I really think Paula Jones is a hero. I don't think I could have taken the abuse she came under. She's this poor little country girl and she has the most powerful man she's ever met hitting on her sexually, then denying it and smearing her as president. And she never did anything tacky. It's not like she was going on TV or trying to make a buck out of it."
Coulter also told Isikoff: "We were terrified that Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the President."
The case went to court after Jones broke with Coulter and her original legal team, and it was dismissed via summary judgment. The judge ruled that even if her allegations proved true, Jones did not show that she had suffered any damages, stating "...plaintiff has not demonstrated any tangible job detriment or adverse employment action for her refusal to submit to the governor's alleged advances. The president is therefore entitled to summary judgment on plaintiff's claim of quid pro quo sexual harassment". The ruling was appealed by Jones' lawyers. During the pendency of the appeal, Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000 ($151,000 after legal fees) in November 1998, in exchange for Jones' dismissal of the appeal. By then, the Jones lawsuit had led to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
In October 2000, Jones revealed that she would pose for nude pictures in an adult magazine, saying she wanted to use the money to pay taxes and support her children, in particular saying, "I'm wanting to put them through college and maybe set up a college fund." Coulter publicly denounced Jones, calling her "the trailer-park trash they said she was," (Coulter had earlier chastened Clinton supporters for calling Jones this name after Clinton's former campaign strategist James Carville had made the widely-reported remark, "Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, and you'll never know what you'll find" and called Jones a "fraud, at least to the extent of pretending to be an honorable and moral person." Coulter wrote: "Paula surely was given more than a million dollars in free legal assistance from an array of legal talent she will never again encounter in her life, much less have busily working on her behalf. Some of those lawyers never asked for or received a dime for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal work performed at great professional, financial and personal cost to themselves. Others got partial payments out of the settlement. But at least they got her reputation back. And now she's thrown it away." Jones claimed not to have been offered any help with a book deal of her own or any other additional financial help after the lawsuit.
Aborted congressional candidacy In 1999 and 2000, Coulter considered running for Congress from Connecticut on the Libertarian Party ticket to serve as a spoiler in order to throw the seat to the Democratic candidate and see that Republican Congressman Christopher Shays failed to gain re-election, as a punishment for Shays' vote against Clinton's impeachment. The leadership of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut, after meeting with Coulter, declined to endorse her. As a result, her self-described "total sham, media-intensive, third-party Jesse Ventura campaign" did not take place.
2008 presidential campaign In a June 2007 interview, Coulter named Duncan Hunter as her choice for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination, saying "my favorite candidate is [Rep.] Duncan Hunter [R-CA], and he is magnificent. The problem is most people say, "Who's Duncan Hunter?" He's a genuine war hero. He has one son, I think, in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. He is good on every single issue. He has been out front on building a wall. He did build a wall at San Diego. He's very good on—on the life issue. He's good on everything."
After Hunter dropped out of the race, Coulter named Governor Mitt Romney as her choice for the 2008 Republican nomination, saying he is "manifestly the best candidate." Romney suspended his campaign in the race in early February 2008.
By contrast, Coulter has been critical of the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. On the January 31, 2008 broadcast of Hannity and Colmes, Coulter claimed that, if McCain won the Republican nomination for president, she would support and campaign for Hillary Clinton, stating, "[Clinton] is more conservative than McCain." Clinton withdrew from the race in early June.
Coulter has also been harshly critical of Barack Obama. For example, in an April 2, 2008 column, she characterized Obama's book Dreams From My Father as a "Dimestore Mein Kampf", a reference to Adolf Hitler's book. Coulter writes, "He says the reason black people keep to themselves is that it's 'easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.' Here's a little inside scoop about white people: We're not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly charming about it." Coulter has repeatedly brought up the subject of Obama's father being raised a Muslim in interviews and has frequently refered to him as "B. Hussein Obama"
Legal and professional disputes Irregularities in public registration In September 2002, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove wrote a column titled, "Mystery of the Ages", raising questions about Coulter's actual date of birth. At the time, Coulter was insisting that she was not yet 40, despite media reports to the contrary. Attempting to resolve the discrepancy, Grove noted that Coulter had given her date of birth as December 8, 1961 when she first registered to vote in 1980 (the year of the Reagan-vs-Carter presidential election), in New Canaan, Connecticut, where the legal voting age is 18. He said that Coulter's Connecticut driver's license also listed her birth date as December 1961, but pointed out that a driver's license issued to her years later in Washington, D.C., gave her date of birth as December 1963. In her emailed reply to Grove's inquiry, Coulter maintained that she was 38 years old. In April 2005, Times cover story on Coulter reported, "Coulter says she won't confirm the date 'for privacy reasons' — she's had several stalkers. 'And I'm a girl,' she adds."
New York Times' NASCAR coverageIn the first edition of Slander, Coulter alleged that The New York Times did not cover NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt's death until two days after he died:
The day after seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt died in a race at the Daytona 500, almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page. Stock-car racing had been the nation's fastest-growing sport for a decade, and NASCAR the second-most-watched sport behind the NFL. More Americans recognize the name Dale Earnhardt than, say, Maureen Dowd. It took The New York Times two days to deem Earnhardt's death sufficiently important to mention it on the first page. Demonstrating the left's renowned populist touch, the article began, 'His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.' The Times went on to report that in vast swaths of the country people watch stock-car racing. Tacky people were mourning Dale Earnhardt all over the South!
The New York Times did, in fact, cover Earnhardt's death the same day that he died: sportswriter
Robert Lipsyte authored an article for the front page that was published on February 18, 2001. Another front page article appeared in the Times on the following day. Coulter cited an article indeed written two days after Earnhardt's death—Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize winner who grew up in the South, wrote a personal piece on Earnhardt and his passing—bringing the total to three days in a row in which the Times covered Earnhardt's death on its front page. (The paper also ran a prominent story about Earnhardt before his death.)
Coulter responded to this widely-publicized error by pointing out errors made by the paper seven decades earlier in its coverage of the Soviet Union:
In my three best-selling books—making the case for a president's impeachment, accusing liberals of systematic lying and propagandizing, arguing that Joe McCarthy was a great American patriot, and detailing 50 years of treachery by the Democratic Party—this is the only vaguely substantive error the Ann Coulter hysterics have been able to produce, corrected soon after publication. CONGRATULATIONS, LIBERALS!!! At least I didn't miss the Ukrainian famine (cf., Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Walter Duranty).
Coulter had corrected the error in the paperback edition of her book.
Canadian troops in VietnamCoulter has been criticized for a statement she made on the fifth estate, an investigative journalism program produced by CBC television. During an interview by host Bob McKeown, Coulter said, "Canada used to be...one of our most...most loyal friends, and vice versa. I mean, Canada sent troops to Vietnam. Was Vietnam less containable and more of a threat than Saddam Hussein?" McKeown contradicted her with, "No, actually Canada did not send troops to Vietnam." On the February 18, 2005 edition of Washington Journal, Coulter justified her statement by referring to the thousands of Canadians who served in the American armed forces during the Vietnam era, either because they volunteered or because they were living in the USA during the war years and got drafted. (Between 5,000 and 20,000 Canadians fought in Vietnam itself, including approximately 80 who were killed.). John Cloud of Time, writing a few months later, suggested that Coulter may have been right, on the basis that "Canada [sent] noncombat troops to Indochina in the 1950s and again to Vietnam in 1972". However, Coulter's initial assertion was that Canada sent troops into Vietnam in support of the American position; in this connection, FAIR countered that Cloud made "quite a stretch to prove that Coulter was correct."
New York Times Christians/Nazis controversyIn her book Slander, Coulter also stated that the New York Times made several statements comparing Christians to Nazis. As examples, she cites a headline reading "Did the Nazi Crimes Draw On Christian Tradition?" and a quote, "The church was co-responsible for the Holocaust." She does not mention that the first quote was from a book review in which the reviewer disagreed with the thesis that the Nazi crimes drew on Christian tradition. The second quote was from a discussion printed in the Times, in which a historian also states that Pope Pius XII was responsible for saving 750,000 Jews.
Controversies and criticism While she is in constant demand on the US lecture circuit, Coulter's polemics - she has described herself as a "polemicist" who likes to "stir up the pot" and doesn't "pretend to be impartial or balanced, as broadcasters do" - sometimes start firestorms of controversy, ranging from rowdy uprisings at many of the colleges where she speaks to protracted discussions in the media.
The 9/11 "Jersey Girls" In Godless, Coulter criticized the four 9/11 widows known as the "Jersey Girls", writing:
These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. ... I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much ... the Democrat ratpack gals endorsed John Kerry for president ... cutting campaign commercials... 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.
These statements received national attention after an interview on The Today Show, and were widely criticized. Coulter refused to apologize, and responded, "I feel sorry for all the widows of 9/11...[but] I do not believe that sanctifies their political message....They have attacked Bush, they have attacked Condoleezza Rice, they're cutting campaign commercials for Kerry. But we can't respond because their husbands died . . . I think it's one of the ugliest things 'the left' has done...this idea that you need some sort of personal authenticity in order to make a political point..."
Comments about the New York Times Coulter has a long-running animosity toward the New York Times. Her book Slander accuses the news media of unfairly criticizing conservatives, and cites the Times as a prime example.
In an interview with George Gurley of the New York Observer shortly after the publication of Slander, it was mentioned that Coulter actually had friends and acquaintances who worked for the Times, namely restaurant critic Frank Bruni and correspondent David E. Sanger. Later in the interview, she expressed amusement at her recollections of the Times publishing two photos of George H. W. Bush throwing up at a diplomatic meeting in Japan, then said:
"Is your tape recorder running? Turn it on! I got something to say...My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." Gurley told her to be careful, to which she responded "You’re right, after 9/11 I shouldn’t say that".
By way of context, during an interview earlier in June 2002 with Katie Couric to promote the same book, Coulter expressed frustration about "constant mischaracterization" through being misquoted. "The idea that someone can go out and find one quote that will suddenly, you know, portray me — just dismiss her ideas, read no more, read no further, this person is crazy...is precisely what liberals do all the time".
When asked by John Hawkins, the web manager of a right-wing blog, through a pre-written set of interview questions if she regretted the statement, Coulter replied by saying: "Of course I regret it. I should have added, 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.'" Lee Salem, the president of Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes Coulter's column, later defended Coulter by characterizing her comments as satire.
The subject came up again when Coulter appeared on the Fox News program Hannity & Colmes. Alan Colmes mentioned Salem's claim, and said to her that remarks like saying "Timothy McVeigh should have bombed The New York Times building" were "laughable happy satires, right?" He then said that Coulter was "actually a liberal who is doing this to mock and parody the way conservatives think." She replied, "Well, it's not working very well if that were my goal. No, I think the Timothy McVeigh line was merely prescient after The New York Times has leaped beyond — beyond nonsense straight into treason, last week". She was referring to a Times report that revealed classified information about an anti-terrorism program of the U.S. government involving surveillance |
