Political analysis
Poor Photoshoping done by Max Headrum
The Manly Mr. Edwards
- By Guest Writer
- July 07, 2007
Can there be anything less masculine than a guy who uses his wife’s skirt for cover during a war of words? On Tuesday, June 26th Elizabeth Edwards called into MSNBC’s “Hardball,” during a segment that featured writer extraordinaire Ann Coulter.
Elizabeth whined into the speaker phone about how mean Ann was and demanded that the Conservative pundit stop picking on her husband. This would have been an appropriate time for John Edwards to simply hand in his Y chromosome and purchase a nice pair of pink pumps for himself, a matching purse, and a tiny dog to carry around in it.
Most of us would understand John running for the hills if he was facing off against someone who was 270 lbs and looked like they would be right at home in a biker bar. In terms of stature John ranks somewhere between Gary Coleman and a Cabbage Patch Doll so we really don’t expect physical courage from this petite former trial lawyer but calling his wife off the bench to defend his honor against jokes Coulter has made at his expense raises the bar for what it means to be a “girly man”.
It is easy to see why he would not want to confront Ann. In any debate the feelings-based arguments of any liberal can be squashed by anybody with junior high school knowledge level of the constitution, history, and economics. Unlike many other talking heads out there, Ann does not feel the need to be polite while taking their positions apart like a cheap erector set. She uses a very quick wit as well as rare depth of knowledge to reduce anyone stupid enough to debate her to a gibbering pile of rhetoric. Most of the liberal pundits who find themselves pitted against Ms. Coulter eventually resort to a strategy that involves trying to talk over her in a desperate filibuster effort. The aim is to do this until the segment ends and they are saved from humiliation by a commercial break.
Nobody would blame John Edwards for ducking a conversation with Ann Coulter. The debate would probably end with him either channeling the spirit of FDR, or quite possibly crying (submissively urinating is also not out of the question). Instead of sending out his wife to fight his battles, he should have stuck to taking shots at her on his webpage.
Much of Mrs. Edwards problem centered around how “mean” Ann has been with regard to her husband; especially Coulter’s criticism of John’s fund raising and campaign strategy that involves reminding people as often as possible that their teenage son was killed in a car accident.
Coulters opinion of Edwards using a family death as a means to get money and votes was best expressed a few years ago when mentioned the possibility that John Edwards has an “Ask Me about My Dead Son” bumper sticker on the back of his car. The ironic thing about Elizabeth’s defense of her husband is that if cancer winds up sending her to the happy hunting grounds there is every possibility that he will be peeling off the “Ask me about my dead son” bumper sticker, and replacing it with one that says “Ask me about my dead wife”. Considering the fact that John Edwards is not only the sort sleazy trial lawyer who would once pretended to channel the spirit of a dead child in order to win a big court settlement but also used his wife’s illness as a campaign photo-op to prop up his sagging poll numbers, it isn’t a very big leap of logic to suggest he is the type of opportunist who is actively rooting for the cancer to win. Her death may mean a few more pity votes during the primary.
The call to “Hardball” was a clumsy hit piece that missed its mark. Coulter was the only one who didn’t know the call was coming, but handled it without blinking an eye. It wasn’t long before Elizabeth Edwards was resorting to the desperate act of talking over Ann. Chris Mathews did his best to aid the phone-in filibuster by trying to make Coulter stop talking. Mathews actually expected Ann to politely cede her interview time and engage in an unscheduled two-on-one argument with himself and somebody who didn’t have the courage to actually show up at the studio.
Obviously, any liberal calling a conservative pundit “mean” is the sort of hypocrisy on par with a book by Teddy Kennedy about the joys of sobriety, or Al Franken offering Rush Limbaugh tips on how to put together a really successful radio show. Here are some examples of what passes for civil political discord to those are still trying to work out the true definition of the word “is”:
• Over the past several years we have listened to liberals in the media refer to President Bush as a liar, tyrant, and the co-conspirator in the 9-11 attack. To Democrats this sort of thing is not “mean”, but rather appropriate expressions of dissent. Howard Dean even called the theory about the White House being aware in advance of the attacks on the World Trade center as “an interesting theory”. The word “mean” was conspicuously absent from his opinion.
• The word “mean” was used mainly by conservatives as a way to describe racist cartoons that began to show up depicting Condoleeza Rice as a house slave, among other negative racial stereotypes. To liberals these were artistic expressions that should be celebrated.
• On June 16, 2005 Dick Durbin compared our soldiers fighting for our safety in Iraq to Nazi’s and Stalinists while speaking on the floor of the Senate. This wasn’t mean though, he just misspoke.
• Bill Maher advocated the assassination of Dick Cheney by saying this after Muslim extremists tried to kill the Vice President – “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.”
• Geraldo Rivera has made numerous claims that the conservative opponents or the immigration bill are simply “xenophobes” and “nativists” who dislike brown people.
• Despite the fact that for years the political left stressed that Chelsea Clinton was off-limits when it came to commenting on the frisky President and his thick ankled first lady, “Driveby-Media” trigger woman Cokie Roberts outed Vice President Chaney’s lesbian daughter on national television during an interview with Lynne Chaney. It is unclear whether or not Mary Chaney was ready to expose that part of her personal life to the public, but despite the fact it was a breach of journalistic ethics, the leftists press tried to hurt the 2000 Bush campaign by dragging her out of the closet.
• During the 2004 campaign, John Edwards and John Kerry both tried to drive a wedge between conservative Christians and the Bush/Chaney campaign by talking about Mary Chaney’s sexual orientation. When Lynne Chaney had a problem with this, Elizabeth Edwards showed her respect for deep, personal family matters by suggesting that Lynne Chaney was simply ashamed of her daughter.
• Finally, John Edwards former campaign blogger Amanda Marcotte, wrote the following about the death of Jerry Falwell, “The gates of hell swing open and Satan welcomes his beloved son.” No word about whether Elizabeth Edwards has called Ms. Marcotte to call her mean, or contacted the Falwell family to offer an apology for what her husband’s former employee said.
This is just a small helping of sort of speech that Democrats generally consider to be appropriate political conversation. To them, none of this is “mean”, it is all just another day in the beltway.
The truth of the matter is that liberals believe that any voice that is raised in opposition to them is something that cannot be tolerated. That is why they are now pushing so hard for the revival of “Fairness Doctrine”; a piece of legislation that will effectively end talk radio as we know it. This brings up all sorts of first amendment rights, but of course anyone who supports free speech is just a big meanie.
This incident will pass as other news comes to the fore. Ann Coulter will not change her ways and the Edwards will go on doing what they do. For the most part this political twosome seems to thrive on pretending they are victims, bemoaning the plight of the poor between $400 haircuts, and passing around a collection plate they have made from the hubcap of the car their son died in. I better stop now or I might be getting a call and a lecture on “niceness” and appropriate political discourse from Mrs. Edwards.
On a final note, I am not really sure who wears the pants in the Edwards household. Perhaps when it comes time for some serious lovin’ in their multi-million dollar mansion, the scene looks like something from the crying game. Perhaps during these intimate moments the words “Squeal like Pig” have passed between the lips of Elizabeth Edwards; I just don’t know, nor do I want to know. What I am certain of is that any wannabe President that gets so emotionally shattered by Ann Coulter that he needs to send his wife out as the designated media pit bull (or would it be pit poodle?) is a wannabe President who would be impotent when it came to dealing with terrorists and rouge nations such as Iran. John Edwards would probably look good in a pair of pumps though.
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Edwards is a sad human being. It’s hard to to sympathize with a smarmy trial lawyer who’s made his living being a scumbag. Parading his wife out to fight his battles is par for the Edwards course. Why should we be surprised?
411 days ago by cheerios