As the networks robotically followed the New York Daily News and its "Coulter Was Cruel" cover -- probably the best TV day for the Daily News since they put Newt Gingrich in diapers in the mid-90s -- they did not consider that some of the 9-11 widows she mocked were also champions of political trash talk.
It should go without saying that by writing in her new book that the widows were enjoying their husbands' deaths, Coulter didn't cross the line, she exploded it with a grenade. (On the other hand, these liberal widows drew hours of TV pundit time that many members of Congress will never see in their lifetimes.) Kristen Breitweiser, the most prominent Bush-trashing 9-11 widow, has sounded like a liberal version of Coulter at times on her huffing and puffing blog at the Huffington Post. For example, on April 5, after complaining that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani shouldn’t be allowed to make a victim’s impact statement ("Which family member did Giuliani lose in the attacks?"), Breitweiser whacked the Bush administration with the snide stick:
By these standards, should I expect Condoleezza Rice (Ms. "Nobody knew planes could be used as missiles"), George Tenet (Mr. "I failed to tell the FBI for 18 months that two known al Qaeda killers were living in San Diego and planning the 9/11 attacks"), and perhaps, George Bush (Mr. "I was reading a story about a pet goat while thousands of people perished and burned alive in the World Trade Center because I didn't want to alarm the school children.") to provide victim's impact statements, as well?
On the Dubai ports, February 23:
As an aside Mr. President, perhaps you should have spent the past 5 years decreasing our dependency on foreign oil from nations like the UAE and Saudi Arabia so that maybe this deal might not have been so necessary for you to rubber stamp.
But, that is just a thought and a dream. A dream that won't come true until you and all your oil-rich friends have sucked this planet dry of every drop of oil and in the meantime cornered the market on alternative energy resources, right? Power-grab; Power-shift?
On the subject of Newsweek's collapsing Koran-flushing "scoop" on May 18, 2005, Breitweiser wasn't so much Coulter as Seymour Hersh, loosely asserting "homicides" and "major human rights abuses" by U.S. interrogators:
Anybody who has looked into some of the allegations floating around about the torture and homicides being carried out by our interrogators must realize that it is a possibility that something like flushing a Koran down a toilet could happen. What do you expect when you have interrogators basically given carte blanche to do whatever they want to detainees....
We have major human rights abuses being carried out by our military and intelligence officers. Such human rights abuses are on their face morally reprehensible and wrong. Moreover, in the long run they put this nation at huge risk. Why? Because every person that is wrongfully held, tortured, and then wantonly released by us, immediately returns to their homeland, tells their story and becomes the poster child for why everybody should hate the Americans....My take? Don't flush the Koran, Flush Bush.
