Columnist Ann Coulter should probably not sign up to be a guest on Bill Maher’s HBO show anytime soon. Maher writer Chris Kelly took her column on the death and funeral of her father, John Vincent Coulter, and mocked her and the dead man relentlessly on The Huffington Post. He even compared her dead father to Hitler. Remember, in our Special Report, we recalled Arianna Huffington proclaimed her site wouldn’t be known for "flame-throwing, name-calling, and simplistic attack dog rhetoric." (What a pile of souvlaki that boast was.)
Chris Kelly, who on this day qualified as the Least Compassionate Man in America, explained he had "taken the liberty of going through the eulogy -- cutting the Kennedy material -- and punching up the rest." Such as:
The longest baby ever born at the Albany, N.Y., hospital, at least as of May 5, 1926, who grew up to be my strapping father, passed away last Friday morning.
And by "strapping" I mean, "he beat me with a strap."
As Mother and I stood at Daddy's casket Monday morning, Mother repeated his joke to him, which he said on every wedding anniversary until a few years ago when Lewy bodies dementia prevented him from saying much at all: "54 years, married to the wrong woman." And we laughed.
Because he was dead.
John Vincent Coulter was of the old school, a man of few words, the un-Oprah, no crying or wearing your heart on your sleeve, and reacting to moments of great sentiment with a joke. Or as we used to call them:
Assholes.
Men. When he was moping around the house once, missing my brother who had just gone back to college, he said, "Well, if you had cancer long enough, you'd miss it."
Unlike Lewy bodies dementia, apparently.
He'd indicate his feelings about my skirt length by saying,
I can see your balls.
"You look nice, Hart, but you forgot to put on your skirt."
Your parents are your whole world when you are a child.
Especially when other children avoid you out of instinct.
You only recognize what is unique about them when you get older and see how the rest of the world diverges from your standard of normality.
Or the cops come.
Besides being very funny, Father had an absolutely straight moral compass without ever being preachy or judgmental or even telling us in words.
If you call a five-decade joke about hating his wife, another about his son being like cancer, and another based on looking at his daughter's ass "funny."
Father hated puffery, pomposity, snobbery, fake friendliness, fake anything. Like Kitty's father in "Anna Karenina," he could detect a substanceless suitor in a heartbeat.
"War on the one hand is such a terrible, such an atrocious thing, that no man, especially no Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of beginning it." - Tolstoy
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." - Some Fatherless Creep
He hated unions because of their corrupt leadership, ripping off the members for their own aggrandizement.
I know I'm forgetting some of the other things he hated, but you're starting to get the picture. Oh yeah, yogurt. Hated it. And mom.
But he had more respect for genuine working men than anyone I've ever known. He was, in short, the molecular opposite of John Edwards.
John Edwards being alive.
Father spent most of his nine-year FBI career as a Red hunter in New York City.
Where Stalin had sent his legions to steal the secrets of Broadway's Golden Era.
He never talked much about his FBI days.
Or dressing like a woman.
Father mostly had contempt for Soviet spies.
Reserving "hate" for unions, snobs, phonies, mom and us kids. Think of him as a kind of grown up Holden Caulfield, crossed with Hitler. Hitler Caulfield. The Catcher in the Rhine. This guy in the front row, he gets it!
Coulter has never been known as a tender humanitarian when it came to pouncing on the flaws of the left. As sad as it sounds, it’s probably not a good idea for a left-wing hate object like Coulter to mourn her father in public with the expectation that someone on the left isn’t going to lob rhetorical grenades and laugh at her loss.
That doesn't excuse Kelly, whose idea of "humor" is mercilessly kicking someone when they're down. Someone should wash out his computer with soap.
