Ann Coulter's Jaw is Wired Shut

Still, Think About the Things that Ann Coulter Has Said

Ann Coulter, among the most loud-mouthed of conservative pundits, broke her jaw in a fall and now she can't talk for a few weeks. This is all supposed to be so funny. But is it?

My long-time reaction toward Ann Coulter was that most everyone, conservative and liberal alike, realized she was a joke. But then last year she visited my hometown of Saginaw, Mich., and she was taken at face value. The hometown newspaper featured Ann Coulter as a legitimate conservative commentator, the same as they might have covered George Will, let's say, or David Gergen. So did the TV and radio stations.

Apparently Ann Coulter did not say anything super-crazy during her Saginaw visit. Her remarks were the usual stuff about patriotic conservatives. None of the reporters really explored Ann Coulter's background.

This means, all jokes about the broken jaw aside, that the Ann Coulter background should be brought to light.

- During the 1990s, Ann Coulter was working for MSNBC and conducted an interview with Robert Muller, a disabled Vietnam veteran who co-founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Coulter expressed a view that a good soldier would know how to avoid the mines. "No wonder you guys lost," she told Muller. (She later said she did not know Muller was disabled, for what it's worth.)

- Ann Coulter's remark on Timothy McVeigh's 1994 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

- Ann Coulter's writings after 9/11: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

- In her 2003 book, "Treason," Ann Coulter reported that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was accurate in many of his assertions that hundreds of American leaders during the 1950s were Communist agents in the employment of the Soviet Union. Therefore, McCarthy should not have faced disgrace. Her book made The New York Times Best Sellers List.