Ann Coulter is vile

... And she may finally have crossed a line into territory where not even red-meat Republicans will follow.

Speaking today at the Conservative Political Action Conference, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter said: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards." Audience members said “ohhh” and then cheered.

This followed previous comments about Bill Clinton's "latent homosexuality" and Al Gore's status as a "total fag."

She then endorsed Mitt Romney.

Republican candidates -- including Romney -- quickly criticized her comments, as did many conservative bloggers (such as Michelle Malkin, who called Coulter "witless"), although some of the criticism was more about tactics than substance.

And then there are the nutcases who lamented that someone could possibly be censured for uttering such a word, arguing that it highlights the power of the gay agenda. But them aside, it appears that Coulter has just cost herself a significant amount of support. And if it's the first step toward her shuffling off the stage into well-deserved obscurity, more's the better.

She followed up a couple of days later by calling Edwards' campaign manager, David Bonior, a front for Arab terrorists -- apparently a reference to the large Arab-American population in the former Congressman's district.

Meanwhile, no further updates on her voter-fraud case.

Update: Several prominent conservative bloggers are simultaneously posting a request that CPAC never invite Coulter to speak again.

Update 2: Andrew Sullivan has an excellent column on Coulter's performance and her defense of it. The money quotes:

The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.

He also had this observation about the CPAC event itself:

Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a "faggot." She's absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. insanity. She could have made a joke about that -- a better one, to be sure -- but a joke. But she didn't just do that. She added to the joke a slur: "John Edwards is a faggot." That's why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised. To put it simply, either conservatism is happy to be associated with that atmosphere, or it isn't. I think the response so far suggests that the conservative elites don't want to go there, but the base has already been there for a very long time. (That's why this affair is so revealing, because it is showing which elites want to pander to bigots, and which do not.)

Well said.

Edwards, Coulter, politics, midtopia