Annals of the Liberal Media

So Adam Nagourney of the New York Times did an entire story on the CPAC conference, including a discussion of Ann Coulter's speech, without bothering to mention that Coulter called John Edwards a "faggot." Nagourney wasn't really alone, as most media outlets chose not to cover Coulter's comments. Joe Sudbay makes a great point:

During the 2004 campaign, comedian Whoopi Goldberg told a joke about George Bush at a fundraiser attended by John Kerry. The right wing erupted and the media went agog over it. The Bush White House led the charge against the comedian trying to keep the story alive. Ken Mehlman was particularly riled up. Then everyone in the right wing demanded John Kerry apologize and rebuke Whoopi, who is, again, a comedian.

Let's review: comedian makes a joke about the President, media frenzy. On the other hand, top conservative calls a Democratic candidate a "faggot" -- an extremely vulgar term that demeans a significant population of Americans and their families -- at an event attended by all the major GOP candidates and the Vice President of the US and it's not even news. Does Dick Cheney approve of that language? You may recall that his daughter is a very prominent lesbian. When Kerry and Edwards mentioned that true fact, the media also went beserk.

And they say it's a liberal media. So many reporters are just patsies for the right wing.

So this obvious media blackout generated enough outrage that Nagourney had to address it. And how did he do so?

In a belated report on right-wing pundit Ann Coulter's reference to former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) as a "faggot," New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney purported to explain a denunciation of Coulter's remark by Edwards, as though it needed explanation. Nagourney wrote:

The question of whether the remark was offensive enough aside, the Edwards campaign saw an opportunity in the remarks of a woman who is about as popular in liberal Democratic circles as [Sen.] Hillary Rodham Clinton [D-NY] is in Republican circles (not very). Mr. [David] Bonior [Edwards' campaign manager] sent an e-mail to supporters last night urging them to make contributions to the Edwards campaign.

Hillary Rodham Clinton? What did she do to deserve a comparison to Coulter? Whether or not Coulter is "[un]popular in liberal Democratic circles," the reasons for liberals' denunciations of her could not be more different from the reasons that Republicans might dislike -- and apparently fear -- Clinton. Last we checked, Clinton had not referred to anyone as a "faggot" or advocated the assassination of anyone. Nor has she, to our knowledge, lamented that Timothy McVeigh did not blow up a news organization.

Not just any news organization, NAGOURNEY'S organization! So we have a writer who tries to literally explain away a pre-planned slanderous remark by saying that the speaker is just like Hillary, and intimates that the Edwards campaign is cynically trying to make use of the controversy.

Gotta love that liberal media.

Glenn Greenwald has a scintillating rant about this entire episode.

But the single most prestigious political event for conservatives of the year is a place where conservatives go to hear Democrats called faggots, Arabs called ragheads, and Supreme Court justices labeled as deserving of murder -- not by anonymous, unidentifiable blog commenters, but by one of their most popular featured speakers.

And after she does that, she is cheered wildly by an adoring conservative movement that has made her bigoted and hate-mongering screeds best-sellers, all while they and their deceitful little allies in the media, such as Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, write idiot tracts about how terribly upset they are by the affront to decency from HuffPost commenters [in between writing obsequious, tongue-wagging profiles of Coulter's most radical ideological allies, such as Michelle Malkin, who penned a lovely defense of the internment of Japanese-Americans, for which even Ronald Reagan apologized (but, I believe, she never cursed while doing so, which is what matters most)].