Alan Colmes was a Weenie Tonight, and Ann Coulter Wouldn’t Take His Bait

Normally I like Alan Colmes. He seems like such a harmless guy, all sputtery liberal indignation. But tonight he was a meanie liberal weenie.

Basically, tonight on Fox’s “Hannity and Colmes” Alan, who is soon to leave to the show, dished out a little nastiness toward Ann Coulter. In so doing, he beautifully illustrated the central point of Coulter’s new book, “Guilty,” which concerns ways in which liberals play the victim card while in reality hurting others.

Colmes criticized Coulter for taking issue with single motherhood on the basis that statistically, children raised by single mothers are more likely to become criminals and suffer other kinds of problems. In particular, he accused her of hypocrisy for this view in light of a chapter in her book in which she writes about famous people such as Barack Obama and Hallie Berry who identify with the fathers who abandoned them while seeming less invested and interested in the parents—in these cases white mothers—who raised them. He kept saying, “You’re criticizing THEM, But YOU’RE the one attacking single mothers!”

Coulter responded that the points were separate: in the first instance, she was making a broad statistical argument about the importance of fathers. In the second instance, she was criticizing celebrities for identifying with the voluntarily absent parent rather than the parent who stayed to raise them. The two arguments were not in contradiction. Nor was she condemning those particular single mothers as individuals.

Whereupon Colmes interjected, “If you like marriage so much, how come you aren’t married already?” She faltered a bit, but did not take the bait, and continued making her argument.

What a perfect example of the way some liberals, when debating issues, are quick to get personal, and nasty – or in this case what they believe to be nasty, since the lovely Ann is no doubt single by choice, and I would not be surprised if she were happier than whoever’s married to Alan. (In addition to unnecessary and inappropriate, his comment was stupid because Ann Coulter is single but not a single mother, and therefore her marital status is not relevant to her discussion of single motherhood). For the sake of balance I feel I should note that nothing Colmes said or did comes close to the meanness dished out by the lovelies at this “liberal” site.

I am not personally inclined to be critical of single motherhood. (I haven’t read Coulter’s new book, but I would speculate that the higher rates of problems among the children of single mothers may reflect correlation rather than pure causation, i.e., may reflect cultural factors, poverty, lack of supervision, low education level, and lack of male relatives who can be involved and serve as role models as well as, or more than, the lack of a father in a child’s life. I would also speculate that, precious as good fathers are and much as having one is the ideal scenario and to be desired, the existence of healthy family, male role models, financial security, etc. in a child’s life could go a long way toward mitigating the potential drawbacks of being raised by a single mother).

Given the way she retained her poise, I suppose that, beyond the initial stun of it, Alan’s comment didn’t really surprise Ann, any more than it surprised me. After all, nothing in this world is more disconcerting to most men, and to unhappy, insecure women, than a beautiful, accomplished woman who is single by choice.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on January 6, 2009 at 2:34 am and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>