Usually Chris Matthews' Hardball provides a welcome respite from the deterioration of political dialogue in this country. In recent weeks Matthews and his deferential commentators have discussed numerous topics that the liberal media patently ignores such as Fred Thompson's powerful musk and the frightening possibility that Hillary Clinton will paint the White House pink. So I was looking forward to spending a whole hour watching Matthews discuss the important issues of the day with Ann Coulter, who was promoting the paperback version of her book Godless, which is only 1,740 places behind Amazon's Number One non-fiction title A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald, who is not blonde or photogenic enough to appear on Matthews' show. Ann Coulter looked great despite her very cheap, Republican haircut and the fact that she apparently hadn't eaten in days.
But then Matthews played a terribly mean trick on Coulter, the beloved conservative pundit. It turns out he had agreed to let Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Presidential candidate John Edwards, call in and confront Coulter without informing his guest beforehand. Coulter seemed shocked that Edwards even had a wife, since she had once called him a "faggot." Was her gaydar not working properly? she seemed to be wondering. Had all those men who had told her they were gay only done so to get her to leave them alone?
Sensing Coulter's vulnerability, Edwards then pounced, laying into Coulter for making personal attacks against her husband. Earlier that morning Coulter had said, "If I'm gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot," which was a line she had probably worked on for months to prepare. By sandbagging Coulter like this, Matthews gave her no time to think of a witty put-down of Elizabeth Edwards, a cutting reference to Edwards' cancer perhaps, and Coulter looked off-balance. It was terribly unfair to Coulter.
Relentlessly, Edwards pressed on with her cruel assault: "I'm asking you politely to stop, to stop personal attacks."
"You're asking me to stop speaking? 'Stop writing your columns. Stop writing your books,'" Coulter asked incredulously. Clearly, Coulter's career would be over if she could no longer use personal attacks. What else would she do? It would be like asking Picasso to stop painting or asking Paris Hilton to stop doing whatever it is she does that makes her famous. Isn't it hypocritical to run a campaign that is supposedly based on helping people rise out of poverty, and then to turn around and attempt to impoverish Coulter?
But Edwards wasn't finished. She then laid into Coulter for her jokes about their son's death in a car accident. Coulter had hilariously claimed in a 2003 column that Edwards had a bumper sticker on his car that said "Ask me about my son's death in a horrific car accident." Apparently, Elizabeth Edwards is one of those humorless liberals who can't take a joke.
"I'm the mother of that boy who died," Edwards said. "My children participate - these young people behind you are the age of my children. You're asking them to participate in a dialogue that is based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues, and I don't think that's serving them or this country very well."
As the audience erupted into applause, Coulter could only repeat herself. "The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking," she said. Couldn't Matthews have paused for a commercial at that point to allow Coulter to huddle with her joke writers? Instead, we were left to watch the depressing spectacle of Coulter sputtering one-liners she has used so many times before. Is there anything more tragic than an aging comedian in front of a hostile audience desperately rehashing old material?
What was supposed to be friendly hour-long interview to help Coulter sell books then devolved into a personal jihad against Coulter as Matthews asked her to justify remarks about other candidates such as referring to Hillary Clinton's "chubby legs," without even providing the context of that phrase, losing all of the subtle nuance that Coulter had worked so hard to craft.
It's really sad the way Elizabeth Edwards has debased our political dialogue by confronting pundits with their own words and threatening their livelihoods. If John Edwards is elected President, this will just give his wife a bigger platform to use the language of hate against political commentators like Coulter who are only trying to make a living. If Coulter is silenced then all we will have left is Jules Crittenden, who is neither pleasing to look at nor particularly funny. America would only have itself to blame.
If Elizabeth Edwards accomplished anything with her unfair ambush of the unfortunate Coulter, she revealed the true agenda of the Edwards campaign. They want to replace the Two Americas we have now of rich vs. poor, a division that has served this country nicely for more that 200 years, with a different Two Americas: unemployed conservative attack dogs vs. everyone else. That is not the kind of America I would like to live in.