Ann Coulter is magic!
With no effort, research, or due process at all, she can tell the difference between a totally bogus, bullshit threat to your bodily harm, and an honest-to-goodness portent of doom. She demonstrated this remarkable skill yesterday in Human Events, in an editorial explaining why Allen West is a war hero, and Rep. Ron Klein a whiny pantywaist.
To wit: If you are Ron Klein and you receive a letter from a biker named Miami Mike, threatening to give you a "good ass-kicking," that would be a noncredible threat. In fact, it ought to be immediately obvious that the letter writer is a gentle-hearted 60-year-old who wouldn't harm a fly, even if that fly was a Democrat. Should you take the threat seriously and turn the letter over to Capitol Police, as per procedure, you are a "little girl in a pink party dress," and Coulter has no respect for you at all.
If, on the other hand, you are Lt. Col. Allen West, who's running for Klein's seat, and you receive an unsubstantiated tip that a friend and ally is part of a terrorist plot, and if you then torture that man until he confesses, then that confession would constitute a credible threat, and proof-positive that you are a good and honorable patriot.
According to Coulter, "Because of [West's actions], West's men were able to capture a potential attacker and identify future ambush sites."
What Coulter refers to is an ugly incident in Taji, Iraq, in which West received a tip that an Iraqi police officer, Officer Hamoodi, with whom West and his men were on friendly terms, was part of a terrorist plot to kill him. West abducted the officer, beat him, threatened his life with death by firing squad, and pressed the man's head into a barrel of sand before discharging pistol rounds beside his ear. Upon pain of death, Hamoodi confessed -- to planning an ambush that, as it turns out, never happened, and for which no corroborating evidence was found.
To recap: Threats given by a man's own free will = ridiculous, whereas threats eeked out of an unwilling source by torture = credible. Got it?
Coulter has always said she was a conservative, but sometimes it takes an editorial like this one to realize just how conservative she is. Her theory of jurisprudence reaches way, way back -- to medieval Europe. She'd have made a fabulous witch-finder general. She just knows who's guilty, deep in her gut, in a way the less morally advanced will never understand.
(As to the possibility that she knows no such thing, and is cranking out half-baked copy in the hopes of advancing a political agenda? Horsefeathers. What are you, a terrorist?)
