I agree 100% with the question, but we need to be couth!
I think so...
[...Am I the only one that thinks being rude in a public forum is uncool? We need to be couth!...]
Edmund Burke said, "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing".
There is a fine line between dissenting and disrupting.
Conservatives have been polite and PC long enough. And where has it gotten us? We are DOORMATS. This was unexpected, because we NEVER defend ouselves. We just let liberals take their nasty little jabs while we politely smile and seethe. They count on us doing nothing. If the jews had faught back, at the first assault, there may not have been a holocaust. There would be far less offenses against Coulter and others, if we had defended our ideology from the beginning and made our opinion more clear.
I think you are generally right that speakers, however odious their personal opinions, deserve at least a modicum of respect if they have the public floor.
But here's the difference: Teddy Kennedy or O.J. Simpson are murderers who continue to escape justice in this world. They should be SHUNNED. Hounding them is simply too good for them. People who apologize for them and preach tolerance for them are accomplices after the fact to the murders they committed, letting them go on with their lives as if nothing had happened.
Ann Coulter deserves a pie-free existence. So does Michael Moore. But murderers of any stripe who have escaped the hangman or prison deserve regular public humiliation, and should stay silent at home.