An advocate for mistreated passengers

Both funny and disgusting, like so much about the US these days – Ann Coulter goes on a Twitter Justice Denied campaign because Delta Airlines robbed her of her chosen seat. HER CHOSEN SEAT I tell you.

Shortly after landing in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Saturday, she launched a full scale Twitter assault against Delta Air Lines — which had apparently bumped her from an aisle seat to a window seat in the same row.

It wasn’t the most obvious moral outrage. There were no lost teeth or passengers dragged by the wrists down the aisle. In fact, the whole dispute concerned a $30 seat upgrade, according to Delta, which has promised to refund Coulter for her inconvenience.

That hasn’t stopped her war. Digressing from her usual commentary on liberals and immigrants, Coulter kept tweeting about the incident all weekend, eventually comparing Delta to dictators and claiming the booking process cost $10,000 of her time.

Ten grand; golly. I’ve booked seats. You go to the airline’s site, you find the right page, you look at the available seats, you decide which one you want, you type in the number and click, you click on confirm. It takes maybe five minutes if you’re really slow? Probably more like two or three, but let’s be generous and allow her five. So she makes $2000 a minute? She makes $2k a minute on the clock, that she doesn’t make while doing other things? So that has to be separate from her royalties on all those best-sellers, because obviously those still roll in whether she’s futzing around on Delta’s booking page or not. So who pays her $2k a minute, for what?

Some time after her flight from New York landed Friday, Coulter began to publicly expose the indignities she had documented on board.

“Why are you taking me out of the extra room seat I specifically booked, Delta?” she wrote beneath a photo of a flight attendant staring at her with some evident concern.

Coulter had, she wrote, been “kicked out of a CAREFULLY PRE-BOOKED seat to a less desirable seat” before takeoff. A flight attendant had “snatch[ed] my ticket out of my hand,” explaining only that an “emergency” necessitated the change, she said.

So where’d they put her? Middle seat in the last row?

No. Window seat as opposed to aisle seat in the same row, the exit row.

Coulter, who did not reply to questions from The Washington Post, has not disputed Delta’s account of her seating arrangements.

But she has continued to complain that she was “ordered” to move, retweeted a fan who called her treatment “abuse,” and compared the flight crew to Nurse Ratchet and Stasi police.

Ah yes, the Stasi. Being moved from an aisle seat to a window seat is very like the Stasi.

We don’t know how long Coulter spent to “investigate” the seating layout on her plane. Nor can we pretend to know the objective value of Ann Coulter.

But there’s little doubt that she’s made a lucrative career in the book and cable news worlds — if one largely built around outrage.

Outraged by Bill Clinton. By the godless “Church of Liberalism.” Lately by immigrants, again and again and again.

And now – airline seat assignment practices!

While Coulter has yet to write a book about her flight, she had tweeted about it nearly 50 times by Sunday morning.

Some fans already consider her an advocate for mistreated passengers, and Coulter appears to have embraced that portrayal — threatening to interrogate Delta’s CEO on-air.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!

6 Responses to “An advocate for mistreated passengers”