A failure to communicate

There is a God, and He or She has a profound and wicked sense of humor.

That’s the only conclusion we can come to with the Tuesday report that one of the right wing’s most aggressive apologists has acquired, well, a little problem with the ability to fully get her point across.

The notorious Page Six of Tuesday’s New York Post reported that Ann Coulter, tireless conservative attack-dog apparatchik and character assassin, broke her jaw recently — the story didn’t say when or how — and underwent procedures to wire her jaws shut for an indefinite period of time.

The Page Six report was apparently unconfirmed, but the stalwarts of journalism at The Post thought it was solid enough to publish anyway.

If it’s true, just think: No speaking from Ann Coulter. No verbal assaults on liberalism, the media and any other targets of opportunity from this self-described polemicist. Blessed quiet, for a while, at least.

Now, we don’t want to get all schadenfreudy about this. Breaking any part of your body is a painful thing. And we can all agree that this week — Thanksgiving week — may be the worst time of the year for this to happen, especially for a woman already as painfully thin as Coulter, now facing the dinner-table prospect of a holiday feast by Cuisinart tomorrow. Turkey in the straw, indeed.

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But there’s no escaping it, if it’s true: After years of racial and religious insensitivity and reactionary vitriol on television, talk radio and between book covers, splashing hate on her political enemies and other people, who didn’t deserve it, there’s undeniable poetic justice in this turn of events. If true, Coulter's injury would be the grimly ideal grace note on the Republicans’ winter of discontent, a perfect physical metaphor for a political party stumbling through its own failure to communicate.

We understand that Coulter was preparing to start a speaking tour in support of her new book, “Guilty,” which reportedly lambasts the media for a pro-Obama slant during the presidential campaign. This would complicate things on that score.

But only for a while. Rest assured, she’ll be back at it sometime before the inauguration, staring at us again with those vacant gumball-blue eyes, jabbering with Glenn Beck on CNN or Sean Hannity on Fox, spouting the invective that has made her a rich woman.

We wish her a full recovery, if not necessarily a speedy one. Meantime, let’s revel in the quiet. “Silence is golden,” the saying goes. Never more so than now.
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Image credits: Coulter: Anthony Catalano, Brooklyn, N.Y., USA, republished under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license. "Guilty" cover: © 2008 Crown Forum.