One-Way Sauce

Say, have you stopped to wonder why Tom DeLay is no longer House Majority Leader and shortly leaving Congress altogether, and Randy "Duke" Cunningham is out of Congress and in the slammer, but William Jefferson - at least as big a crook as the inspiration for "Top Gun" - is being garishly defended by both his fellow Democrats but the House GOP leadership as well?

How is it that, as Rush Limbaugh put it today, liberals "can run around and call Bush 'Hitler,' and they can run around and say all these horrible, rotten things. Michael Moore can produce a movie chock full of lies. They can have people right books on assassinating George W. Bush and we're told, 'We need to see the movie. We need to read the book. There are things to learn, here. Bush is the biggest terrorist in the world.' There's actual slander and libel that the left is engaging in," but let Ann Coulter speak the truth about the "Jersey girls," and overnight she is the pariah?

Here's what AC said:

Coulter, the hard-right pundit known for her above-the-knee hemlines and below-the-belt punchlines, wrote that "the Jersey Girls" love being 9/11 widows because it made them rich, gave them national attention and let them criticize President Bush without fear of reprisal.

"How do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?" Coulter writes. "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much."

I would agree that the latter graf is outrageous except for one thing: the former graf. Who knows what state their marriages were in before 9/11, but what they've done since then has indeed made them rich, did indeed give them national attention, and did indeed let them savage President Bush without fear of reprisal. Kind of a group Cindy Sheehan. It is the Jersey Girls who politicized their husbands' murders, and when they did that, when they stepped into the partisan arena, they and everything about their actions became fair game. Something that wouldn't be questioned in the slightest were they on the other side of the aisle. And somebody on the Right finally had the ovaries to land on them for it with both feet.

Indeed, they'd be getting the treatment Annie is now. The difference being Coulter can more than defend herself, as the next president of the United States found out the hard way:

Conservative author Ann Coulter is firing back at Senator Hillary Clinton, after the former first lady attacked her for being "vicious [and] mean-spirited" towards a group of politically active 9/11 widows.

"I think if she's worried about people being mean to women she should have a talk with her husband," Coulter told radio host Sean Hannity, who was hosting a book signing for the conservative firebrand on Long Island. "This is, I remind you, Bill Clinton's wife," Coulter added. "[And I'm the one who's] mean to women?"...

"She may know the 9/11 widows, but you and I know Juanita Broaddrick" - a reference to the woman who accused Mr. Clinton of sexually assaulting her in 1978.

Coulter delivered her broadsides against Mrs. Clinton as a phalanx of TV and print reporters looked on.

I have to ask something that you might be surprised to see me write: Who the hell is Ann Coulter? That's the question Mrs. Clinton should have asked herself before opening her big yap. Hillary is a United States senator and her party's inevitable 2008 presidential hammer & sickle banner-bearer; Ann Coulter is a pundit endlessly eviscerated in "progressive" circles who hasn't always played all that well with those in her own camp. I would think that as far as Mrs. Clinton was concerned, Ann Coulter wouldn't be a pimple on her fat, wrinkled ass. So why is the witch of Chappaqua reacting to the blond bombshell from Long Island and raising her to an equal status level? And getting waxed in the verbal exchange besides?

And finally there is this Turtle Bay tantrum:

Secretary General Kofi Annan's deputy assailed the United States on Tuesday for withholding support from the United Nations, encouraging its harshest detractors and undermining an institution that he said Washington needed more than it would admit.

"The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable," said the deputy, Mark Malloch Brown. "You will lose the U.N. one way or another."

In a highly unusual instance of a United Nations official singling out an individual country for criticism, Mr. Malloch Brown said that although the United States was constructively engaged with the United Nations in many areas, the American public was shielded from knowledge of that by Washington's tolerance of what he called "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping."

"Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said.

"A highly unusual instance of a UN official singling out an individual country for criticism"? Is Brown kidding? After Isreal, the U.S. is "singled out for criticism" in that snakepit all the time. Has been ever since George W. Bush took office and refused, belatedly, to dip the knee to King Kofi and his mob of thieves, dictators, and terrorists over enforcing its own dictates to Saddam Hussein. And yet the Bushies haven't pulled the plug (as, quite frankly, they should have long ago), haven't defunded it, have instead gone the extra mile, above and beyond the call of duty, to save it from itself.

But that means...criticism of internationalist drones like Mark Malloch Brown and King Kofi from both the center-right American government and its straight-talking Ambassador and the American taxpayer who foots the bill for their extravagence, arrogance, perversions, and rank incompetence. As though they're entitled to enforced immunity from any challenge to or accountability for their cowardly, corrupt, anti-Semitic actions, and the Bush Administration is obligated to silence Turtle Bay's U.S. critics and coercively indoctrinate its own people on the U.N.'s behalf.

The common thread running through it all, extending back for decades, is still unbroken: if you're right-of-center, it's open season on you; lefties can lie and defame and slander and utter the most gutteral, vicious attacks, slime you as a Nazi and a fascist and a terrorist and a mass-murderer and a sicko and a sexist, bigot, racist, homophobe, etc., even call for your assassination, and that's "free speech," permissible because of their self-proclaimed inherent moral superiority; but if a conservative makes even constructive criticism of anybody or anything on the Left, makes a piñata any of their sacred cows and shibboleths, or Gaia forbid unloads in like kind with the bald truth, the lib establishment goes nuts.

Concludes El Rushbo:

When the truth is spoken about them, why, it's an outrage! - and they stop the presses, and they start talking about cruelty. They never examine their own extremists or their own mainstream types who have said far worse things than Ann Coulter has said, and they don't have the ability to say these things with humor. All I'm saying is, folks, that a bull's-eye has been hit, and they can't handle it, and I am all for it any time somebody gets the truth out about the left and their reaction to it, because it's instructive to people, the whole country - and they are on the ropes, and their reaction proves it.

Because they think themselves divinely appointed to rule, the Left has long since disdained the idea of persuading people through open debate. Consequently they have forgotten how to debate at just the time that their rancid, obsolete, despicable ideology and rotting governing templates have become functionally unarguable. The end result? A towering sense of political entitlement that sees every public exchange as a one-way street.

One reason amongst many why liberals are no longer "kings of the road" - or anything else.