Response to "They Shot the Wrong Lincoln"

In this week's column (August 31, 2006), Coulter calls yet again for the assasination of a public figure, and that's even before we get to the body of the text! She attacks Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island, calling him, among other things: a "half-wit;" kicked in the head by a horse, and a "silver spoon moron." She says he can't read books, but gets his information from reading Doonesbury and watching The West Wing. Chafee's crime that made him the target for such abuse was simply not voting along the Republican party line.

She also grossly distorts history to make her point:

After Chafee's family money got him into Andover and Brown, he made his living shoeing horses for seven years… When the farrier business proved too taxing for Chafee's intellect, he went into the family business — politics. His father died in office, and Lincoln was appointed by the governor to serve out the remainder of Pop's term in the U.S. Senate… In terms of qualifications for the job, Chafee makes Michael Brown look like Donald Rumsfeld.

To listen to Coulter, Chafee was an unqualified blacksmith who was chosen out of the blue to fill his father's seat in the Senate. Shoeing horses one day; off to Washington, D.C. the next. While it is true that Chafee worked as a blacksmith after graduating from Brown University, Coulter doesn't mention that he also worked in manufacturing management.

Most telling is her complete omission of his entire pre-Senate political career. After working for a few years after college, Chafee became a delegate to the Rhode Island Constitutional Convention. He then served six years on the Warwick City Council, and seven years as mayor of Warwick. Warwick is the second-largest city in Rhode Island. In 1999 he was appointed to the Senate seat after his father's sudden and unexpected death, but ran for election the following year and won with a sixteen percentage point margin of victory. Coulter omits all these facts from her column, but does make a point of the fact that the Republican currently challenging Chafee for the Republican nomination is the mayor of Cranston, the next smaller town in Rhode Island.

Writing for The Providence Journal, Shiela Lennon says of the title of Coulter's column:

Wishing death on those she disagrees with is despicable and brings no honor to those she supports.

We couldn't agree more.

Sources:

September 13th, 2006 Posted by Eric | no comments
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