Coulter: The Aftermath

The aftermath is that almost all the things Ezra and Coulter's organizers have said about the cancellation of her speaking event at the University of Ottawa on Tuesday night have proven bogus. Lets walk through a few of them.

1) The cops/U-of-O shut down the event. Nope. It was Coulter's own gang of organizers that pulled the plug, contrary to what Coulter said late Tuesday.

2) The cops advised Ezra and his gang of volunteer fuck-ups from the University of Ottawa Campus Conservatives (who rented a room several orders of magnitude too small) to shut down the event. Bullshit! Or at least, that isn't the cops' story:

Ottawa police also issued statements about the Coulter affair Wednesday. Spokesman Alain Boucher said the police did not shut down the event, but said a different venue was needed to hold the crowd of around 1,500 people.

"We strongly suggested that this venue was not large enough to accommodate all the people that had attended," he said. "We had safety concerns with the sheer number of people that were there . . . with different views on issues."

And here's Boucher speaking to another media outlet:

Ottawa Police Services spokesman Const. Alain Boucher said officers had safety concerns because there were about 1,500 people in the lobby outside a venue with just 175 seats and shared those concerns with campus security, event organizers and Coulter's bodyguard but left the decision to them.

Note the police reasoning here: basically, the organizers hadn't rented a large enough room for the number of people that showed up. This speaks not to the efforts of the literally dozens of demonstraters who showed up and protested non-violently, but to the inability of the U-of-O Conservative Campus Club to rent a hall for a crazy lady and her maybe 1,000 fans/critics without having the whole event descend into chaos. Nobody can blame "The Left" for this. Maybe, if anything, the conservatives on the U-of-O campus need a little bit in the way of Special Ed.

3) The event was shut down by protesters. Again, bullshit! There were maybe 100 of these people, and the one report of anything resembling violence at the event is 3rd party. People say they heard a table got thrown over, for example, but nobody saw it, not even Deb Gyonpang who first reported it. On the other hand, there are a multititude of stories about the incompetence of the wevent organizers:

7:00: Doors still not open, people getting really antsy given poor logistics (more on this later)

And:

It was a disaster in terms of just organization, which is probably one of the reasons why it was cancelled.

Finally, 4) Ann Coulter was subject to death threats prior to the event. Double bullshit! Triple! Here's the document Ezra sent CBC to make the case: in the twelve pages taken from an Ottawa-area Facebook page, there is one reference to hurling rotten tomatoes, one to tarring and feathering, and one suggestion that Coulter should be dipped in gravy and locked in a room with a wolverine high on angel-dust. Now, two things about this last: 1) it would have been extremely difficult to smuggle both a wolverine and the requisite amount of gravy into the U-of-O auditorium, and 2) if it was Coulter that was supposed to be high on angel dust, I doubt one wolverine would do the trick. In any case, if that's what Ezra and Ann were afraid of, they are bigger chicken-shits than I ever imagined.

PS. And I was a little wrong yesterday in noting that nobody important was planning to show up at the Coulter speech; she did manage to snag back-bencher Brent Rathgeber.

PPS. Here's a photo-stream from one of the kids that "infiltrated" the event. Terrence thinks they (the kids) are scary.