On some cosmic level, perhaps, he had earned the benign neglect of history. For one thing, he’d acknowledged his mistake, from the beginning. “You saw it,” he’d said at the time. “Not good.” Now, with the exact measure of understatement he’d used that grim October night long ago, he described his return to Shea. “It was nice,” he said simply, and that was all he needed to say.

Perhaps that stoic willingness to shoulder responsibility is why, on a cool Friday night in July, as he sat in the stands at Shea Stadium in New York, the most intrusive anybody got with him was to wander over and ask, “You’re Bill Buckner, aren’t you?”

Buckner was so blasi about it that he claimed he wasn’t certain if it was the first time he’d been back. It was at Shea Stadium, of course, that in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, a ground ball hit by Mookie Wilson of the Mets skittered between his legs and past first base and into baseball history, concluding as nightmarish an inning as could be recalled by even the fans of that Freddy Krueger of franchises, the Boston Red Sox. Buckner could have made excuses — he shouldn’t even have been out there hobbling around the infield on his bad ankles, the inning should have been long over, they should’ve already been celebrating the championship — but it was still Buckner’s error, and he lived up to it.

If Bill Buckner has a poker face, Pete Rose’s is a perpetual Munchian scream of woeful denial, and Ann Coulter’s is that of a swaggering pirate, complete with eyepatch. I confess I had never thought of Buckner and Rose as subjects for contrast, let alone Buckner, Rose and Coulter. But as I watched Buckner laugh with old baseball pals, as I remembered the younger Buckner whose Boston teammates used to tell me projected a kind of infectious calm, I got to thinking about how the three of them join together to vividly paint the opposite ends of some deep American spectrum about assuming responsibility.

Rose is about to complete Year 13 of his nonstop insistence that he didn’t do it — bet on the baseball team he was managing — even if he signed a document saying he did. In that time he’s blamed a dead commissioner of baseball, a fired commissioner of baseball, the current commissioner of baseball. He’s dragged reporters and players into his ever-enlarging sinkhole. He’s made fuzzy-cheeked minor leaguers liable for reprimand by falsely claiming they had asked him to coach them. He’s claimed that his letters seeking reinstatement have been returned unopened and that the only phone numbers his lawyers have been given to call have been disconnected ones.

His most newly minted rationalization, if you haven’t heard it, is that 1989, the year of his banishment for having allegedly wagered on the games of the team he managed, is so long ago that murderers convicted that year have already gotten out of prison. He appears to have figured out why he didn’t get very far with his earlier argument: that even if he had bet on the Reds, all of the evidence suggests he never bet against them, so that made it ok. Of course, a manager betting on his own team every day might, on some relative scale, be ok; a manager betting only periodically must necessarily be suspected of using his better pitchers in the games on which he’d wagered, and not in those he didn’t – a kind of passive-aggressive game-fixing.

But I tend to think Rose is a lot closer to understanding what he did, and why people hold it against him, than is Ann Coulter. Since Sept. 11 she has been a veritable out-of-control firehose of venom, whipping around crazily, streaming invective wherever she happens to point. I wouldn’t be so disturbed if I sensed there was a glimmer of irony in this new book of hers, some quick wink of Buckner-like acknowledgment that “Slander” might be read not as a title, but as a description of the contents.

Alas, no. It will never occur to Coulter that in the vast crowd of us who appeared on television news in 1998, and focused entirely on the itinerary of President Clinton’s genitalia, she was up near the front. It’s a big crowd, and some of us tried to disperse it. But we’re all there — I’m including myself — and as we head to purgatory for our sins, if not hell, we should all solemnly acknowledge that in fact there most obviously was something else to which we should have been paying attention, and didn’t.

Last September I went back and checked the logs of my old MSNBC show and discovered to my surprise that in the two months before we changed the meaning of the parent company’s acronym to “Nothing But Clinton,” my most frequent guests were James Dunegan, a craggy bespectacled man who talked endlessly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threat of anthrax being delivered to Broadway, and Dr. Richard Haas, then of the Brookings Institution, who warned constantly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threats to, and in, this country.

Then one day Mr. Dunegan and Dr. Haas were swept away, never to appear again. Instead we got Terry Jeffrey and Bob Barr and Christopher Hitchens, and our lower-grade sister shows got Newt Gingrich and Barbara Olson and Ann Coulter. That I escaped Coulter was merely a throwaway favor from my masters. They had been hinting she’d have to be a guest sooner rather than later. Then she went over-the-top: Despite an eye infection, she could not keep herself off television. I begged my bosses not to make me interview a guest who was literally wearing a huge, distracting eyepatch. Thus my imagery of her as a pirate: For a week she continued to flail away at the wrong evil while looking like a refugee from some camped-up version of “Treasure Island.” But not on my show.

Mistake me not here: Ann Coulter didn’t cause Sept. 11. Not in a billion years would I accuse her, or any of the others (not even Barr), of that. But with hindsight one has to ask why the prospect of a country unprepared for terrorism wasn’t a sexy enough topic for her and the others to use to pound Clinton and the Democrats. Certainly they got with the program after Sept. 11, blaming Clinton for being soft on Osama bin Laden and terror. The Clinton folks struck back, and for a while it was compelling television controversy and worthwhile political debate, a hot TV commodity that at least contained some crumb of public good. Why wasn’t that interesting before Sept. 11?

Last fall when Coulter reacted to the death of her friend Barbara Olson on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon with pronouncements that might have made the Crusaders blanch, I defended her. I lost friends on two planes, and two more at Cantor Fitzgerald, and I argued that on top of her personal grief, she was operating from some extremely human wish to undo the horror. Perhaps, I said, deep inside her there was some vague connection of the dots between her share of the responsibility for the transformation of “News” into “Nothing But Clinton,” and our unpreparedness for the attack. Perhaps she was getting ready to reckon with her own small but significant role in distracting the country from what should have mattered in 1998. No one rallied to my line of thinking. Slander certainly chased away anybody who was considering doing so.

Thus stand this odd trio of my creation: Pete Rose, his hair ever more absurdly tinted and his self-defense ever more absurdly obscure; Ann Coulter, bellowing without pause so she can’t hear even her own conscience if it somehow elects to whisper “j’accuse” at her; and Bill Buckner, leaning on a batting cage at Shea Stadium, for a time still literally stuck within that hundred-foot radius of where it all happened, smiling at the irony and receiving back what he emits, a gentle Zen-like acceptance.

While Buckner’s error is the most obvious and the most easily proven, with the most obvious consequences, it is also — more important — the least protested. Rose and Coulter could learn something from him.

But they probably won’t.

Coulter admits she relies on Pethokoukis, so let’s go directly to the source. To recap, Nutting crunched Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office numbers to find that under Obama, spending has risen at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, less than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. It jumped 8.1 percent in the last three years of the George W. Bush presidency, and in fiscal year 2009, for which Bush approved the budget, it jumped 17.9 percent. But Bush isn’t the most profligate Republican: Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term.

Pethokoukis quarrels with Nutting’s assigning Bush’s budget to Bush, because “Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it.” Exactly how one president undoes the spending approved by another president under a different Congress goes unexplained. The AEI pundit also argues that we should look at federal spending as a percent of GDP, and he notes that’s gone up under Obama, attempting to prove that Nutting is mistaken – but that’s a useless metric during a recession, which by definition shrinks GDP.

Coulter goes even further (of course). “It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.” (The italics are in the original; they’re where the good writing is supposed to be.) She continues: “That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column.”

Shockingly, Coulter is … wrong. First of all, only about $120 billion of the stimulus was spent in fiscal year 2009 – and Nutting counted it in Obama’s column. He also included new funds appropriated under Obama and the Democratic congressional majority for the child health insurance program and other projects. And it says so quite clearly on the nifty chart Coulter finds fault with: $140 billion spent in the 2009 budget year is plainly attributed to Obama. It also says so in the text of the story, for people who don’t read charts.

“I attributed all the new spending I could find to Obama,” Nutting told me in an email. “I looked at the CBO’s budget outlook from Jan. 2009, and spending for ’09 was actually lower than CBO projected. And spending has been flat since then.”

Coulter also claims that Nutting’s piece has been ignored by the New York Times, but in fact David Firestone weighed in today, and made a point I should have made: It’s actually sad that a Democratic president is kvelling about cutting the rate of federal spending growth to its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower (actually, I made that point last August). Firestone notes that various budget deals aim to cut discretionary spending by $800 billion over a decade, by trimming education, food, housing, transportation and job training programs. “This category of spending, which used to be 5 percent of the gross domestic product in Nixon’s days, is heading down to less than 2 percent,” Firestone notes. Pethokoukis and Coulter ought to be applauding.

I’ve hailed Nutting’s piece not because I’m happy that Obama has presided over such stingy budgets (largely forced to by congressional Republicans), but because I’m glad to see a reporter telling the truth. If Pethokoukis and Coulter are the best the GOP can do to tear his work down, maybe more reporters will join him.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-2-2011/conservative-minorities-vs–liberal-minorities?xrs=share_copy

09/13/01: Remembering the Day We Forgot the Lessons of the Day We Had Sworn We Would Always Remember

A lot of people say Ann Coulter is toxic. But we had no idea that she would take that literally. You would laugh at her if she wasn’t making light of a terrible tragedy.

Watch Schultz’s segment in full. Note Ann Coulter’s glowing green head.

Coulter cites a 10-year-old newspaper article and some studies by fringe scientists as proof to her theory. She goes on to compare radition — which she says is “a sort of cancer vaccine” — to “poisons” like zinc and magnesium found in multi-vitamins.

Bill O’Reilly invited Coulter onto his show last night and scolded her for misleading the audience into misunderstanding the well established dangers of radiation: