Counter Coulter: The search by Democratic presidential contenders for Jewish familial links, reported at length by the Forward last year, has been given a new spin by the Republican right’s favorite blond spinmeistress, Ann Coulter. The way she sees it, it’s all part of an elaborate plot by the Democrats — or, as she delicately puts it, “the Treason Lobby” — to distract voters from their lack of credible ideas.

Here’s how she put it in a November 20 column, titled “The Party of Ideas,” in townhall.com, an online organ of the conservative Heritage Foundation: “The Democrats have discovered a surprise campaign issue: It turns out that several of them have had a death in the family. Not only that, but many Democrats have cracker-barrel humble origins stories and a Jew or lesbian in the family. Dick Gephardt’s campaign platform is that his father was a milkman, his son almost died and his daughter is a lesbian. Vote for me!”

Exploiting a family tragedy for political purposes, Coulter writes, is a pillar of the Democratic platform. “John Edwards injects his son’s fatal car accident into his campaign by demanding that everyone notice how he refuses to inject his son’s fatal car accident into his campaign,” she writes of the senior senator from North Carolina. And no tears are shed over the recently recovered remains of the brother of party frontrunner Howard Dean: “After working on the failed George McGovern campaign, Charlie Dean went to Indochina in 1974 to witness the ravages of the war he had opposed. Not long after he arrived, the apparently ungrateful communists captured and killed him. Hey fellas! I’m on your s— CLUNK!”

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When Dems aren’t crying over coffins, Coulter continues, they’re all oy and no goy: “In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats’ other big idea — too nuanced for a bumper sticker — is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There’s Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew — along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering.”

“The Democrats’ urge to assert a Jewish heritage is designed to disguise the fact that the Democrats would allow the state of Israel to perish as Palestinian suicide bombers slaughter Jewish women and children,” Coulter writes. As to their “perverse desire to discuss the deaths and near-deaths of their children,” she adds, it “is designed to disguise the fact that they support the killing of more than a million unborn children every year.”

Her conclusion: “If the Democrats start extolling you — get a gun.”

Funny — we were going to say the same thing about Ann Coulter.

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