On Tuesday night, following the announcement of the outcome of the Illinois Republican presidential primary, Ann Coulter offered Derek Hunter, subbing as a nighttime host on WBAL-FM in Baltimore, her thoughts on the debate about birth control — and the role Georgetown Law student and contraception activist Sandra Fluke has played in it.
“They keep calling her Sandra ‘Fl-uck’ on MSNBC,” Coulter said. “I think they think it sounds better than Sandra ‘Fluke,’ but I think Sandra ‘Fl-uck’ sounds like a Chinese aphrodisiac.”
The ordeal goes back earlier to a February congressional hearing in which Fluke told lawmakers that it costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over a three-year stint in law school if her health insurance doesn’t pay for the contraceptives. Fluke also argued that the government should force insurers to cover the expense.
That testimony led conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh to call Fluke “a slut,” and “a prostitute.” The resulting back-and-forth focused on what constitutes proper discourse, with the left attacking Limbaugh and the right asking why that standard only applies to conservatives. Liberals like Bill Maher have historically been given a free pass when they have made similarly misogynistic remarks.
Hunter suggested the moniker “annoying 30-year-old loser” was more appropriate for Fluke. But Coulter referred to her previous column and explained that conservatives shouldn’t react to these situations in the way the left reacted to Limbaugh and Fluke.
“It’s not that they’ve overreacted — it’s also that we’ve overreacted,” she said. “We’re not pussies like them. We don’t care what names we’re called. We all stop whining and weeping and, ‘Oh he called me a name.’”
“No, I almost didn’t write about it because I thought that the waters had been so muddied with all the cross-charges on what people had been called. But she is my favorite kind of liberal: the hysterical drama queen.”
These types of controversies arise with regularity, Coulter said.
“It happens, like, once a year,” she said. “It is my favorite liberal prototype: the Jersey Girls, as I describe in the column.”
“The furor over a fictional TV character Murphy Brown who was attacked by Dan Quayle, that woman who attacked John McCain at her graduation speech at the New School. You had Joe Wilson, of course. He writes the column in The New York Times claiming he had been sent on this important trip and denouncing George Bush’s policy in Iraq. And then says, ‘No, no, no — you can’t attack me. You can’t mention where my wife works.’”
“No, these people inject themselves into some national dialogue. They’re criticized, then they run around claiming to be martyrs for having their voices silenced.”
And Coulter didn’t just take issue with the substance of Fluke’s “voice,” but its tone as well.
“Why is her voice being silenced?” Coulter added. “It’s as if — Could you write it down for us? That screechy voice of yours, you’re sounding like Sarah Palin. Just write it down for us. It’s the voice we can’t take.”