Coulter explains her harmless, inoffensive little joke:
Right, and I suspect everyone listening to your show knows about that. I mean, I know — well, I guess Pat is out in America now; you’re primarily in New York City. I give a lot of speeches out in America, I frequently visit America, and Americans are pretty freaked out about somebody going to rehab for using a word, and that’s of course what I was referring to. And I don’t think there’s anything offensive about any variation of faggy, faggotry, faggot, fag. It’s a schoolyard taunt. It means — it means wussy. It means, you know, Hillary giving a speech in a fake Southern drawl — that’s faggy. A trial lawyer who weeps before juries is faggy. Lifetime-type TV, faggy. Everyone understood I was not literally calling — well, I was not calling — well, for one thing, I wasn’t calling John Edwards anything. That was the whole point. I couldn’t talk about him, his life’s work, his appeasement policies, his wimpiness on foreign policy, because that word is out of bounds. So, in point of fact, I called John Edwards nothing. I said I couldn’t even discuss him because using any variation of that totally excellent word would send me into rehab.
This is, of course, the woman who “jokes” about murdering New York Times reporters en masse and assassinating Supreme Court judges and Democratic Presidents. Nonetheless, I find this defense extraordinary. Up until last week, there wasn’t a person in this country who would have argued that “faggot” is just a harmless word, offensive to no one. To say that it’s just a “schoolyard taunt” — well, I spent my middle school years in the south at the height of the integration battles (America being the place where I grew up and live today, unlike Ann, who apparently views it as a foreign land she sometimes has to visit). There were plenty of “schoolyard taunts” in those days targeted toward race, far beyond the “n” word. By Ann’s logic, she should be free to use any of them in discussing Barack Obama, because they were nothing more than harmless “taunts.” Why, if she phrased the joke properly — “I can’t call Obama a —— because it would be sooooo politically incorrect, ha ha ha!” — she could even claim that she hadn’t called him anything at all.
I invite her to try.
… it’s also sad that Ann, allegedly a professional writer, can’t think of a single way to discuss her negative feelings toward a presidential candidate without using a term that is considered hateful and offensive by most rational people. Maybe she should consider another line of work.