Elizabeth Edwards' smackdown of Maureen Dowd, Ann Coulter

By GottaLaff

Watch out MoDo and Madam's Apple, not everyone rolls over and plays dead:

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.

Oh-h, (lady-like) suh-nap!