OKAY, I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST to jump on Ann Coulter’s, um, overheated rhetoric after 9/11. (And scroll up from that post for much, much more). Since then I’ve mostly ignored her. But everyone’s getting upset over this statement:

Then she said: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

I told her to be careful.

“You’re right, after 9/11 I shouldn’t say that,” she said, spotting a cab and grabbing it.

Uh, actually she shouldn’t have said it before 9/11, either. I suppose it’s not meant to be taken any more seriously than the claim in the same interview that Matt Drudge is ” the sexiest man alive,” but still. . . .

Patrick Nielsen Hayden writes that Mickey Kaus shouldn’t give someone who says this sort of thing a permalink on his site, and helpfully uses the example of someone who wants to kill me as the kind of person he wouldn’t link to. (He in fact links to a few people who call me names on a regular basis, but that’s okay: sticks and stones, and all that.)

Having completely lost control of my too-large blogroll (I can’t even keep up with people’s changes of URL), I don’t think I’ll point fingers on that subject. Coulter’s schtick, though, is to say outrageous and provocative things. In a culture of political correctness that’s a virtue of sorts in itself — and in the early-to-mid-nineties, when that sort of thing was at a peak in the mainstream media, she made it work, as, in a different way, did Maureen Dowd. But those days are long gone, and provocativeness isn’t the same thing now. We’re at war, and, as Ari Fleischer helpfully reminded us, people need to pay attention to what they say.