Coulter’s slur inexcusable

While President Bush is working zealously to import democracy to the Middle East…

While his administration has roundly — and rightly so — criticized Syria’s continued presence in Lebanon…

Regardless of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s statements on Tuesday calling on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon…

Regardless of the president’s unequivocal call yesterday for Syria to “get [their] troops and [their] secret services out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish,”…

No one from this administration — the White House included — has spoken out against the ethnic slur that right wing commando and GOP pin-up girl Ann Coulter hurled at veteran White House journalist and octogenarian Helen Thomas this week.

In her latest column, loud and often foulmouthed Coulter, who eviscerates anyone and everyone on the left and defends anyone and everyone on the right without even the most casual regard for the truth—in her typical take-no-prisoners fashion — referred to Thomas, who is of Lebanese decent, as “that old Arab,” solely for the purpose of defending GOP shill and fake reporter Jeff Gannon, whose gay escort Web sites were discovered by left wing bloggers two weeks ago.

While many people will shrug the comment off as “no big deal,” I ask that you take a moment to think about the spirit and intent of Coulter’s comment, and the harm that it could potentially cause, both at home and abroad.

If Coulter is anything, it’s not stupid. She earns her living using words, much like a terrorist uses roadside bombs to kill innocent civilians and soldiers. The slur was not accidental. Since the column first appeared on the web, several journalists and groups have expressed their outrage with Coulter. She has, however, refused to remove the slur from the column on her Web site. Even Universal Press Syndicate, who syndicates Coulter’s columns, has requested that she edit the epithet out of the column.

Fortunately, UPS saw the comment for what it was — an ethnic slur — and removed it from the version of the column they distributed, replacing it with “dyspeptic,” which means “ill-humored.”

So what was Coulter’s motive, besides being her usual vitriolic self?

It’s no secret that many people on the right dislike Thomas, who does have a reputation for being unfriendly to Bush, so much so that the White House removed her recently from her ceremonial first-row seat and plopped her in the last row. Thomas, whose Hearst Newspapers’ column is distributed by King Features Syndicate, however, has long been infamous for her hard-hitting questions to every president, political party notwithstanding.

Coulter is just one of a pack of pit-bull journalists who lunge at anyone who dares walk within reach of their chain. She is blindly and unapologetically partisan. Her strategy is to throw as much mud as she can to increase the chances of something sticking. So what if an octogenarian and respected journalist gets hit by shrapnel in the process!

Just chalk it up to collateral damage.

And for what? To defend a gay prostitute who was posing as a journalist, who wrote for a GOP political activist Web site, who regurgitated White House talking points in his “articles,” who lobbed softball questions to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and President Bush, while managing to stick it to Democrats in the process.

When left wing bloggers asked the question, “Why has a man with no press credential — who doesn’t work for a real news source, who is using a fake name, whose photos are plastered on at least half a dozen gay porn sites, who was denied a congressional press pass — been let into the White House daily for two years?” Sensing that her master was under attack, Coulter lunged, hackles standing up.

And because Coulter’s no shrinking violet, and she knows that the louder she barks, the more people listen, she decided to pepper her defense of Gannon with an attack on Thomas. And if she could add some fuel to the anti-Arab fires burning in the United States, even better.

What’s truly unfortunate is Coulter knows that the trash she peddles attracts the extreme fringe of the right wing, the kind of bigots who lump all Arabs together in the same terrorist heap. It doesn’t matter to Coulter if Bush considers Lebanon an ally and a possible model for democracy in the Arab world. It doesn’t even matter to her if her column incites hatred or violence against Arab-Americans and Arab nationals living in this country. And it certainly doesn’t matter to her that the White House allowed a hooker who used an alias into the White House pressroom.

What matters to her is waging a journalistic jihad against anyone who dares exercise his democratic right to challenge this president’s policies, which of late have included numerous attempts to manipulate the press. And if her AK-47 hits a few innocent people in the process, so be it.