Ann Coulter wrote an (even for her) incredibly vitrolic column designed to run on the first day of the Democratic convention. As Ace of Spades writes:

I don't think this Coulter's best work. I don't even think it's her B-act. But that's not the point.

The point is is that this "editor" disingenuously keeps writing "I DON'T GET IT" after each and every joke. The editor either does "get it," or else USAToday has joined up with the United Way in some sort of Give-a-Retard-a-High-Paid-Media-Career program.

it's an (unbelievably) safe bet that Coulter's editor at USA Today is somewhere on the left of the political spectrum. It's one thing to be in the tank for your team, but it's another to not understand what sort of lingo its opposition frequently uses to deride them. It's also another to work for a newspaper and not know recent history:

Coulter: A speaker at the Democratic National Convention this year, Al Sharpton, accused white police officers of raping and defacing Tawana Brawley in 1987, lunatic charges that eventually led to a defamation lawsuit against Sharpton and even more eventually, to Sharpton paying a jury award to the defamed plaintiff Steve Pagones. So it’s a real mystery why cops wouldn’t like Democrats.

USA Today editor: IS THAT LAST SENTENCE SARCASTIC? IF SO, YOU SURE LOST ME.

Was this editor even sentient in the mid to late 1980s? Sharpton and Tawana Brawley were one of the most important and divisive news stories of the era.

I'd go on, but Ace has done a thorough job of doing a double Fisking of sorts--explaining and occasionally critiquing Coulter's original intent and slicing and dicing her clueless editor.

As much as I make sport of the media and complain about how frequently leftwing bias shapes what used to be passed off as objective news reporting, I've rarely called them clueless here before. But it's astonishing that somebody with no feel for recent events or contemporary society is editing writers at USA Today.

*Of course, (Ala Brawley and Sharpton, come to think of it!) there's another possibility here, as one of Ace's commenters indicates. It's possible Coulter was emailed a boilerplate "I'm sorry, but this doesn't meet our standards/this isn't what we're looking for/this is way over the top" rejection, and is cooking the books by making up these comments.

The vast majority of rejection letters I've gotten from editors have all read like they've come from what Florence King once called The Republic of Nice. But every once in a while, I get one with teeth. And as much as Coulter is, as James Lileks once wrote, "a Lumper", I've never thought of her as a liar (Treason, while lumping all Cold War-era Democrats together as being, well, treasonous, contained some 50 pages of footnotes) and I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt until, and unless, further evidence emerges.