Topic: NewsBusters
Can anyone at the Media Research Center criticize Ann Coulter unequivocally without bringing in anyone else for comparison purposes? It appears not.
A March 5 NewsBusters post by Warner Todd Huston compares Coulter's "faggot" remark to Bill Maher's statement on his HBO show for noting that if Vice President Dick Cheney had died during a suicide bombing in Pakistan, "other people, more people would live. That’s a fact." According to Huston, "Coulter's comment is intemperate, childish, lowbrow, even frat house-like for its part, but it was just a derogatory name in the end. Maher wants people KILLED, for Heaven's sake."
Well, so does Coulter: Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, employees of the New York Times. But Huston fails to mention that, nor does he offer any evidence that he condemned those statements to the extent he criticizes Maher. Indeed, a search of NewsBusters for the seven days after Coulter made her January 2006 remark that "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee" found only a single passing mention of the remark and absolutely no criticism of it.
To his credit, Huston does criticize Coulter's outrageous schtick:
Of course, I am sympathetic to her core message of conservative values, but in my opinion she is no longer an effective conservative columnist having long ago diluted her message by a career that has advanced to the stage of "personality" instead of pundit. She is the H.L. Mencken of our times... minus the intellect.
Sadly, she obviously feels she has to say increasingly outrageous things to stay at the top of the news. In fact, at this point she isn't much different than Whitney Houston, Paris Hilton, or Britney Spears all of whom seem to feel a need to continuously up the ante of crazy behavior to keep getting noticed.
In other words, Coulter no longer does much to aid the cause because her own fame -- or more properly her infamy -- has become her driving force, the cause having been eclipsed by her need to stay in the news. I feel, at this point, that she is hurting us on the right more than helping us.
However, Huston still feels the need to equivocate, suggesting that conservatives haven't criticized Maher to the extent they have criticized Coulter. Considering that the highest-ranking employee/writer at the MRC to publicly criticize Coulter to date is, uh, Huston, that's not exactly an accurate comparison.
