Mourning In America

By John Tierney for the New York Times, appearing in today's WSJ, and reprinted on blog The Peking Duck (for those of us without a NYT Online subscription...):

Michael Berg, a Green Party candidate for Congress on Long Island, announced on national television that he regretted the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He didn't blame Zarqawi for beheading an American contractor. The man responsible was President Bush — "the real terrorist."
Any other politician would have been vilified for saying that. But Berg, as the father of the American who was beheaded, belongs to a new politically invulnerable class. Arguing with someone in mourning just isn't done — unless, of course, you are Ann Coulter and you have a new book to sell.
She managed to offend everyone from Hillary Clinton to Bill O'Reilly by suggesting that some of the activist widows of the Sept. 11 victims were enjoying their husbands' deaths. That's over the top even for Coulter. But she has identified a real problem: how do you conduct a political argument with grieving relatives?
Coulter faults liberals for exploiting victims and their relatives as human shields for their arguments against the war and in favor of gun control. But conservatives use these tactics too. President Bush had the parents of a slain Iraqi soldier stand up during the State of the Union address as a tacit endorsement of his policy. Republican widows of Sept. 11 victims have been exploiting their status to oppose the Democratic widows.