I’d like to thank J. Goodrich for digging up all those extra examples. That just adds fuel to the rhetorical fire. After all, Coulter’s latest comments come after some have distanced themselves from her, but the people who stood by her as she made those earlier ones ought to be called out on it. And there’s no reason she should be allowed to skate just because she spews venom with a wink and a flip of her hair. The refusal by otherwise good people to take the threat to our public discourse posed by back-to-the-19th-century horrorshows like Coulter seriously is half the reason we’re all in the mess we’re in.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.