My mother always taught me to watch what I say. Words are invisible, of course, so you can’t really watch them, even when they’re words you never should have said. When you speak words you’ll later regret, they fall out of your mouth like a bowling ball plummeting from the sky, smacking the ground with a resonating thud. Sometimes, when you say something, you just can’t take it back, no matter how hard you try, how much you repent, how much you beseech the victim of your verbal attack for forgiveness. Whenever we speak—especially when we are upset, excited, or otherwise emotional or vulnerable—we should always take care to exercise that filter in the front of our brain that warns us, like the proverbial angel on our shoulder, to think twice. Or maybe even three times. I hope two celebrities, whose recent vitriolic words earned them much negative media airtime, have learned that lesson. Somehow, I doubt it.

First, there is everyone’s favorite hippie-chick-turned-wannbe-blonde-bombshell-conservative, Ann Coulter. It’s now old news that she called a group of 9/11 widows "self-obsessed…as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them." Here’s the new news. On the July 27th edition of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Coulter called former Vice-President and Presidential candidate Al Gore "a total fag." The night before, she had declared on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch that former President Bill Clinton "shows some level of latent homosexuality." She defended her comment about Bill Clinton to Chris Matthews: "…everyone has always known, widely promiscuous heterosexual men have, as I say, a whiff of the bathhouse about them." Coulter later claimed she was "just kidding" about Gore, but reiterated her comments on Clinton. "It’s not only not a joke," she declared, it’s not even surprising."

Not only did my mother teach me to watch what I say, she also taught me that, "If you give a fool enough rope, he’ll hang himself." Or, in Ann Coulter’s case, herself. First, she insulted a group of American women left grieving widows by America’s most historic terrorist attack—dismissing the pain, anger, and frustration of widows who only wanted to know what part American policy played in the attack, what could have been done to prevent this attack, and what can be done to prevent future attacks. For her recent encore, Coulter practiced armchair psychology on one of the most successful, revered Presidents America has ever known. In case her warped logic escaped you, Coulter obviously equates promiscuity only with gay men, as if a promiscuous heterosexual is so rare that, if we ever found one, we’d have to put it on display in a zoo, so we could all wonder at its uncommonness with mouths agape. Since Clinton had sexual relations outside of his marriage, he is promiscuous and, therefore, has a touch of the gay disease.

Not long ago, Coulter declared that she has a number of gay friends, and that they agree wholeheartedly with her steadfast stance against gay marriage. I suppose if Coulter had been alive during America’s slavery years, she would have had a number of African-American friends who simply adored picking cotton with their feet shackled together. Coulter is either lying about having gay friends who don’t support gay marriage, or her gay friends are so closeted and self-loathing, they may as well crawl back into the closet and stop making the rest of us look bad. I have no idea what verbal bombshell Coulter will drop next, but the more her face appears on the television screen, the more cracked her comments become. It’s only a matter of time before the majority of Americans dismiss Coulter as another self-serving, publicity-starved, loathsome loudmouth with her own agenda on her mind, not the agenda of most Americans. Oh, how the mighty speak stupid words and reveal themselves for what they are.

Speaking of speaking stupid words, I just can’t get enough of the Mel Gibson DUI debacle. As of this writing, he has apologized to the entire Jewish community, although it’s up in the air as to whether or not the Jewish community will forgive him for his declaration that Jews are responsible for all the wars in history. Some archconservatives still defend Gibson, citing his intoxication. I reject this excuse for several reasons. First, Gibson blew only a .12 on the breathalyzer. When I got a DUI several years ago, I also blew a .12, and I didn’t even mouth off to the cops about idiots like Ann Coulter. Second, as a sober alcoholic, I’m a firm believer in the old Roman maxim, "In wine, there is truth." Third, no matter how inebriated you may be, drunkenness does not excuse hateful, harmful words. Finally, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Mel Gibson’s father was a notorious Holocaust revisionist, and Gibson himself answered numerous anti-Semitic accusations after he released The Passion of the Christ. For some reason, no one seems very concerned that Gibson called the female police officer a misogynistic, belittling, and sexually-charged, if hysterically silly, name. I guess our ADD culture can only run with one ball of controversy at a time.

I hope that Coulter and Gibson both keep falling and falling down the scale of public opinion. I hope the public and the media give them both more than enough rope to hang themselves. As much as I despise conservative politicians and personalities, there’s nothing more entertaining than watching one of them have to eat their words—or, better yet, live with them. The conservative ideology is based on the notion, however thinly veiled, that all people ought to be Caucasian, male, heterosexual, Christians, and if you’re not, you must remain subservient. It’s inevitable that, for people who are so full of themselves that they actually accept this notion, their idiocy will eventually bubble over and spill itself on the ground for all to see. I say, "Bring it on!"