Alan Caruba writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the media never reported on the supporting arguments Ann Coulter used in her criticism of the 9-11 "Jersey Girls." To attack someone's statements, but neglecting to address how the person backs them up, is a classic media technique for delegitimizing or even dehumanizing an opponent.
Coulter noted, as she does in her book, that these "Jersey Girls," after receiving huge amounts in compensation for their losses, then went public blaming President Bush for having failed to anticipate and prevent the 9/11 attacks. The mainstream media made much of them while ignoring some very key factors that undermined their views. Coulter, of course, did not.
Naturally, the media only selectively quoted from remarks in her book, "Godless."
Noticeably missing from the initial press reports was any mention of what Coulter actually wrote:
"The 9/11 Commission was a scam and a fraud, the sole purpose of which was to cover up the disasters of the Clinton administration and distract the nation's leaders during wartime. Not only did the Jersey Girls claim credit for this Clinton whitewash machine, they spent most of the hearings denouncing the Bush administration for not stopping the 9/11 attacks from the weak position handed it by the Clinton administration."
The gist of what Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza claimed was that an August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing should have alerted Bush to order immediate action to prevent 9/11.
The number one fact missed by the media was that Coulter was attacking the knee-jerk support that the "Jersey Girls" had for Bill Clinton, demonstrating that their first priority was not "getting to the bottom" of whom to blame for 9-11, but instead to score political points againts Bush.
Coulter notes in her book that "all the information about bin Laden in the August PDB comes from the nineties. Not one fact in the PDB is more recent than 1999."I grant you Coulter takes no prisoners when she writes.
"Mostly the witches of East Brunswick wanted George Bush to apologize for not being Bill Clinton," was her take on the Jersey Girls, but "the rest of the nation was more interested in knowing why the FBI was prevented from being given intelligence about 9/11 terrorists here in the United States more than a year before the attack..."
The answer - well-known by now - is that Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, "had specifically prohibited intelligence agents from telling law enforcement agents about suspected terrorists in the country."
And whom did the Democrats put on the 9/11 Commission? Jamie Gorelick.
So what we are seeing in the denunciations by members of the U.S. Senate and now the New Jersey Assembly represents more than a fair amount of partisanship.
Coulter has done a very good job of documenting her case. If some Jersey Girls get a public spanking in the process, so be it.
