"She was just calling him a wuss."

That was the explanation actually offered by a Fox News "expert" Monday in justifying Ann Coulter's use of a variation on the three-letter f-word to describe John Edwards.

I don't usually waste much time dissecting Coulter's verbal diarrhea (though these guys have here) -- it's an act calculated to fire up her base and provoke the kind of big media condemnations which only reinforce her liberal media bias claptrap. Even Wash Post media critic Howard Kurtz got pulled in this time, dissecting why it took media so long to cover her nonsense.

But this incident, captured on camera and cheered by conservatives, highlights a recent trend I've found awfully disappointing: prejudiced statements in media from people who should know better.

Consider Kenneth Ng, a columnist for AsianWeek magazine, who wrote a hate-filled column titled "Why I Hate Blacks" with reasons such as "blacks hate us," "blacks are weak-willed" and "blacks are easy to coerce."

AsianWeek editors have not yet answered how this piece reached publication, or why they initially resisted complaints from the community. Ng has since been released by the publication and executives there are apologizing. But it took a letter writer to the newspaper to point out that unfair laws banning Asians from emigrating to the U.S. were struck down by the same Civil Rights Act enacted to end institutional, Jim Crow-era racism against black people

(for proof Ng is an unbalanced blowhard, look no further than his appearance on the show that gave us Coulter as wimp detector, Fox News Channel's Big Story with John Gibson. Even Gibson denounced the guy, who claims his bigoted views came from suffering discrimination himself in college).

And then there's Dr. McGay-basher, Grey's Anatomy co-star Isiah Washington, who outed castmember T.R. Knight with the three-letter f-word during an argument with another castmember. Then he used the word again in the press room of the Golden Globes while lying about the incident ever happening again.

Homophobia in the black community is nothing new -- Tim Hardaway's "I hate gay people" remark is the most recent Exhibit A -- and quite baffling. How can a group of people who endured more than 200 years of state-sanctioned oppression turn around and dump that hate on some other group?

This is one of the least-understood aspects of diversity activism: When it works, everyone benefits.

The biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action programs have classically been white women. These women often were the leading edge in diversity initiatives that prepared the way for wider diversity in corporate boardrooms and seats of power. As Max Blumenthal points out in this well-done column on the Huffington Post, Coulter herself is an unmarried woman in her '40s whose own career success would hardly be possible without the advocacy of Affirmative Action programs and feminism.

All that is a fancy way of saying people who have faced discrimination themselves should be the last ones to visit it on another group of people. And that Coulter doesn't get that is truly the saddest thing about her dysfunctional rantings.