Elizabeth Edwards Raps New York Times's Maureen Dowd

By Deborah Kotz, Washington Whispers

For all those meanies who've been bashing Elizabeth Edwards in the press, she has some grenades to hurl right back. In response to a recent New York Times column by Maureen Dowd that called Edwards's new book, Resilience, "just a gratuitous peek into their lives, and one that exposes her kids, by peddling more dregs about their personal family life," Edwards says Dowd is way off base and adds that she'd have been "foolhardy" to think she'd be protecting her kids by not writing about her life.

"My children aren't protected from the death of their brother, my breast cancer, or any of the things that have happened in our family," says Edwards. "They're smart kids, they have Google alerts. They already know." Dowd, she adds, "has written an editorial where she clearly does not understand this."

And then Edwards had some choice words for Anne Coulter, the conservative commentator who once called John Edwards a "faggot" and joked that she "wished he'd been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

"I called Anne Coulter and complained, asking her if she doesn't feel some responsibility to raise the level of discussion," says Edwards.

She insists her book wasn't written out of spite or revenge for her husband's admitting to having an affair and the possibility that he has an out-of-wedlock child with his mistress. "If I wanted to write an angry, vindictive book, it's not that I don't know how," she says. "I know how to write that. That's a really easy book." Instead, she says, she was trying to write in a "nonjudgmental, accurate way" about "all these yucky things that have happened to me." She does admit, though, that she didn't say things in the most "protective way" that she could have but rather in the most "representative" way.

And all that criticism from the media? "It doesn't bother me," she says, since it "allows us to have a conversation about things that are worth having a conversation about."

Check out Deborah Kotz's full interview with Elizabeth Edwards here.

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