I’d never bother reading the “Moonie Times”; it’s a propaganda organ for the far right and the Moonies.
They are firmly in the *“If they say the sky is blue check for an overcast” *league of journalistic reliability.
Well, in this case it seems widely documented that Ms. Coulter actually did throw a shit-fit on Twitter and elsewhere over getting bumped by from a previously-reserved seat on a Delta flight, so I’m not sure what the relevance of your comment is.
The thing is, this isn’t a situation where the airline is being shitty. Shifting people around so that a family can sit together is not a shitty thing to do. Asking someone to move to a seat that is functionally identical is not a shitty thing to do. Then they went above and beyond by refunding her even though her accommodations were equivalent.
And, yes, I agree that she is entitled to less sympathy. She’s not some poor person who has to take the cheapest flight they can get. She can afford to fly on other airlines, or even hire her own private jet to fly her. When you have the money to alleviate your problem and you don’t, people are less sympathetic to your plight.
I find it much, much easier to empathize with the family wanting to sit together than the entitled rich person who didn’t get the exact seat she wanted and even got paid. If anything, Delta’s reaction to this makes me more likely to use them. They shrewdly gave her just enough to undermine her arguments and her attempt to harm the company because she didn’t get her entitlement.
Just out of interest, do you have even a single shred of evidence that this was the reason for the changed seat assignment? The airline has not said as much, and neither has Coulter herself. I’ve read at least a dozen stories about this incident, and not a single one says that keeping family members together was the reason behind the seat reassignment.
If you have any evidence to the contrary, i’d be happy to revise my assessment.
By the way, Delta is being criticized by another entitled asshole online this week.
This guy, who is apparently a journalist and sports analysis on Fox Sports, wrote a long blog post about how his family was prevented from reaching their destination because his son, on a trans-Atlantic flight, was discovered to have head lice. They landed in Minneapolis, where they were due to make a connecting flight to Nashville, but Delta refused to let them fly once the airline found out about the kid’s lice.
He has a whole lot of complaints about this, ranging from whether it’s an airline’s job to medically screen its passengers, through to the question of whether the whole family should have been grounded just because one kid had lice. Some of his points are stupid; others have some merit.
The real kicker here, though, is not so much his argument regarding this particular incident, as the place of that argument in his broader worldview about passengers and airlines. As quite a few commenters on his blog post noted, this is what he said back in April about the incident where Dr. David Dow was dragged off a United flight:
Also, can you imagine what an asshole like this would do if he were sitting in his seat on a plane and saw that someone else’s kid, sitting in the seat next to him, had head lice?
I went by what was revealed in the thread. When Sunny Daze asserted this was the reason, you did not contradict her. And yet you were clearly in opposition to her, meaning you had every reason to contradict her on that and didn’t. I just assumed that this information had been revealed somewhere that I had missed.
Still, you seem to be saying that, if this was the situation, your assessment would be different. Well, we don’t know the situation was. So assuming it’s the airline being stupid enough to jerk around some rich person with a built in following who you know would bitch about it seems rather premature.
I still do contend that, if she’s rich enough that she was out $10,000 for this, implying she could have made that money in the time she spent researching, then she could have just as easily hired a private plane.
When you have enough money to mitigate your situation, people aren’t likely to be sympathetic. And, if you’re also such a colossal asshole that people who hate the word “bitch” will still call her one, it’s hard to have any sympathy for her.
She got her $30 back. She tried to shame the other person who got the seat, despite it almost certainly not being their fault. She acted like a rich, entitled spoiled brat, and thus deserves no sympathy beyond the sympathy for whatever in her life led her to be such a shitty person.
People like her challenge my personal “rule” that sympathy is such an easy thing to give, so why not give it.
Well, with Sunny Daze i was admittedly more focused on addressing her apparent belief that it’s always easy to avoid an airline if you need to fly somewhere. You right, though, that Sunny Daze implied that Delta was keeping a group together. I’d be interested to know if that was just a wild guess, or it there’s any evidence for it, because i haven’t seen any.
Actually, even if it was the situation that Delta were keeping a family together, i probably wouldn’t change my assessment too much. While it’s nice to keep families and other groups together, sometimes it’s not possible.
I usually fly with my wife, and we basically always sit together. But there have been a couple of times where, due to things like late booking or forgetting to check in early or booking our tickets separately, we were sitting in different rows. You know what we did? Pretty much what we always do when we fly: read a book or took a nap. I love my wife, and i like being arouind her, but i also live with her, and we’re not going to die if we’re separated for a few hours in a flying tube.
Coulter’s flight was from New York to Florida. What is that? Maybe a two-hour flight? With the exception of small children and the disabled, anyone who can’t bear to be seated apart from friends or family for that length of time needs to get a sense of perspective.
Ann Coulter is a flaming asshole, and further confirmed it with her behavior after this incident. My main observation about this whole thing is simply that, if she had been anyone else, i reckon she would have received a lot more sympathy, especially given the general public attitude to how airlines treat their customers.
So he… wanted his son to be stranded alone in Minneapolis while the rest of the family flew on to Nashville? This is the “family values” that Republicans keep screaming about?
Actually, i think the idea was that one parent would fly home on their original flight with the two uninfested kids, and the other parent would stay in Minneapolis and get lice treatment for the other one.
Did you read the thread title? Or the other posters who commented on how unreliable the Times is? That’s the “relevance”.
Of course if you extend the metaphor, black voters only other option is the Republican Airlines - who tend to fly into a mountain every second trip. Sometimes accidentally, and sometimes not.
If Coulter booked on United, they would have refunded her upcharge and thrown in a beating for free!