Ann Coulter managed to turn just everybody this side of the skinheads against her when she called John Edwards a "faggot." Even the New York Post was able to create a separate section out of the angry reader reactions: "incredibly offensive" ... an "indication of all that is wrong with politics today" ... and "pushing many of us (Republicans) away from the party."
General Peter Pace followed up by stumbling into a pronouncement that homosexuality is "immoral." Then things really got interesting.
By denouncing General Pace's comments, without actually uttering the words moral or immoral, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tried to tiptoe past the issue like teenagers sneaking out at night. Nice try. Big money gay donors and a chorus of others quickly said: "where do you two think you're going?"
More condemnation - not to mention monologue material - followed the hopeful statements of neonatal theologian R. Albert Mohler Jr. that homosexuality might be cured in the womb - a splash of hormonal gay-be-gone and, bingo, another potential deviate nipped in the bud. Why not? It works for crabgrass.
Such events alone are not the point - funny things happen in the run-up to an election. Far more interesting is the reaction.
Mean-spirited taunts are no match for some infuriating truths -- lives and treasure lost in war without foundation or direction; the unconscionable treatment of returning wounded thrown into that war; the failure of compassion, will and competence on the Gulf Coast; hopes of home ownership crushed by just-sign-here mortgages; a stomach-churning stock market; Social Security heading toward a cliff; tens of millions without health insurance; ousted federal attorneys; outed CIA agents; Greenland melting - and on (and on) it goes.
Do we really have time for name calling?
The melting pot no longer simmers with preferred and lesser ingredients. It is becoming harder and harder to find a good reliable group to pick on. Gays and lesbians, in fact, may have been the last.
Karl Rove won two elections by rounding out a base of fiscal conservatives with those who think employers should sponsor a bring your gun to work day, those who demand control over the bodies of others, those who would selectively grant the right to marry and raise kids, and those who believe Noah was able to fit the dinosaurs on the Arc because they were babies.
Blown to bits by the epic failures of those it put in office, that coalition is going to be very difficult - if not impossible - to reassemble, particularly in a country where more of us than ever are aware that good, legitimate, useful and happy lives can grow from experience that is different from ours and, in fact, we may not fully understand.
Someone said recently that the right is facing its "wilderness years." So try this the next time you are in the mood for a philosophical argument: If Ann Coulter says something nasty when she is standing alone in a forest, does she make a noise?