Ann Coulter's father John died last week, and this week she honored his memory with a column containing not one, but two Ted Kennedy jokes. I know I'd be proud.
Hahaha! Ted Kennedy! Back me up, mourners! I know you're out there - I can hear you breathing! Unlike dad! That lady in the shroud... she knows what I'm talking about!
Such is a daughter's grief. Think of her, then, as Ophelia with her violetless garlands, crossed with a real fucking hack.
But where's the Hillary material? Come on. It's right in front of you, Ann -- dad's dead... Hillary cries... you do the math.
Clearly, Ann's not at the top of her game. So I've taken the liberty of going through the eulogy -- cutting the Kennedy material -- and punching up the rest.
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The longest baby ever born at the Albany, N.Y., hospital, at least as of May 5, 1926, who grew up to be my strapping father, passed away last Friday morning.
And by "strapping" I mean, "he beat me with a strap."
As Mother and I stood at Daddy's casket Monday morning, Mother repeated his joke to him, which he said on every wedding anniversary until a few years ago when Lewy bodies dementia prevented him from saying much at all: "54 years, married to the wrong woman." And we laughed.
Because he was dead.
John Vincent Coulter was of the old school, a man of few words, the un-Oprah, no crying or wearing your heart on your sleeve, and reacting to moments of great sentiment with a joke. Or as we used to call them:
Assholes.
Men.
When he was moping around the house once, missing my brother who had just gone back to college, he said, "Well, if you had cancer long enough, you'd miss it."
Unlike Lewy bodies dementia, apparently.
He'd indicate his feelings about my skirt length by saying,
I can see your balls.
"You look nice, Hart, but you forgot to put on your skirt."
Your parents are your whole world when you are a child.
Especially when other children avoid you out of instinct.
You only recognize what is unique about them when you get older and see how the rest of the world diverges from your standard of normality.
Or the cops come.
Besides being very funny, Father had an absolutely straight moral compass without ever being preachy or judgmental or even telling us in words.
If you call a five-decade joke about hating his wife, another about his son being like cancer, and another based on looking at his daughter's ass "funny."
Father hated puffery, pomposity, snobbery, fake friendliness, fake anything. Like Kitty's father in "Anna Karenina," he could detect a substanceless suitor in a heartbeat.
"War on the one hand is such a terrible, such an atrocious thing, that no man, especially no Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of beginning it." - Tolstoy
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." - Some Fatherless Creep
He hated unions because of their corrupt leadership, ripping off the members for their own aggrandizement.
I know I'm forgetting some of the other things he hated, but you're starting to get the picture. Oh yeah, yogurt. Hated it. And mom.
But he had more respect for genuine working men than anyone I've ever known. He was, in short, the molecular opposite of John Edwards.
John Edwards being alive.
Father spent most of his nine-year FBI career as a Red hunter in New York City.
Where Stalin had sent his legions to steal the secrets of Broadway's Golden Era.
He never talked much about his FBI days.
Or dressing like a woman.
Father mostly had contempt for Soviet spies.
Reserving "hate" for unions, snobs, phonies, mom and us kids. Think of him as a kind of grown up Holden Caulfield, crossed with Hitler. Hitler Caulfield. The Catcher in the Rhine. This guy in the front row, he gets it!
In the early 1980s, as vice president and labor lawyer for Phelps Dodge copper company, Father broke a strike against the company ... Every day, Father walked with the strikebreakers through the picket line, (in my mind) brushing egg off his suit lapel.
And his skirt.
By 1986 it was over; the mineworkers voted against the union and Phelps Dodge was saved. For any liberals still reading, this is what's known as a "happy ending."
Not as happy as this funeral. But happy.
Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan.
"Hey, Ron, is it always this hot in here?"