Posted on 09/24/2003 5:15:23 PM PDT by Forgiven_Sinner
NEW YORK - Ann Coulter rules as the saucy, blond siren of the Right.
Lashing out at all things liberal and Democrat (labels she uses interchangeably), she treats conservative Republicans to a spicy brand of reassurance that has leveraged her into multimedia stardom with talk-TV appearances, a syndicated column and big-selling books with shrill titles.
A year after her successful "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right," Coulter carries on with "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism." The book already has spent 12 weeks on The New York Times list of best sellers, most recently in seventh place.
But despite bubbling sales and wells of success, Coulter has been faulted for research that is routinely sloppy and facts that are contrived.
"She builds a case on half-truths," declares Ronald Radosh, a historian and author whom Coulter salutes as a fellow conservative.
"She's a cultural phenomenon," concedes Joe Conason, a liberal columnist with his own best seller, "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth." He adds, "I wouldn't characterize what she puts forward as ideas. They're more in the nature of primitive emotions."
Bring it on, Coulter responds.
"There are people who would scream bloody murder if I wrote, 'It's a lovely day outside,'" she says with a satisfied look: People screaming bloody murder about her is great for business.
Continuing to do great business, "Treason" aims to spring Joseph McCarthy from history's gulag as "a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives," Coulter sums up.
Seizing quite the opposite position, her book lionizes the 1950s Wisconsin senator for his holy war against Communist spies in the United States, a crusade she argues was done in by the soft-on-commies Democratic Party, which has since compounded the outrage by demonizing McCarthy with its "hegemonic control of the dissemination of information and historical fact," she says between bites of a turkey club.
Writing the book was a mad scramble, Coulter reports during a recent lunch interview. She began "Treason" only last October, "but I worked pretty hard," she says. "I cut down on TV (appearances). I worked every Friday and Saturday night."
Veteran journalist and commentator M. Stanton Evans, who is writing a book on the McCarthy era, shared some of his extensive research with Coulter and "went over her manuscript on the McCarthy chapters," he says. "I can vouch for the facts. Her interpretations are obviously hers. They're obviously meant to be provocative."
Indeed, Coulter's McCarthy makeover only sets the stage for her wildly provocative main theme: Democrats, always rooting against America, are "the Treason Party," she explains with throaty conviction.
Democrats have "an outrageous history of shame," she says, "and they've brushed it all under the rug," racking up a shameful record that persists to present-day Iraq (news - web sites), where the Democrats, she claims, are hoping for America's comeuppance.
So the broad purpose of "Treason," says Coulter, "is to alert people, to send out flare lights: Warning, warning! Democrats can't be trusted with national security!"
It's all very simple.
In Coulter's America, everything, it seems, is simple. She reigns over a bipolar realm of either right or wrong; love or hate; smart or idiotic; men or — a Coulter favorite — "girly boys," a distinction that in her book yields such questions as the language-garbling "Why are liberals so loath of positive testosterone?" as well as "Why can't liberals let men defend the country?" (By men, she means Republicans.)
"Everything isn't black and white," counters historian Radosh, who has long contended that Communist spies posed an internal threat after World War II. Radosh draws the line at canonizing McCarthy for his blacklisting campaign to flush them out. "But the people who respond to her are people who already agree with her, and they don't want any nuance."
Just mention nuance to Coulter and she scoffs.
"As opposed to spending 50 years portraying McCarthy as a Nazi?" she says with a scornful laugh. "THAT's a very nuanced portrait! I think it's just meaningless blather, this nuanced business."
This nuanced business only muddies the issue, she insists, whereas generalizations are, in her view, a simple, get-to-the-heart-of-it way to make a point.
For example: "Gen-er-al-ly," she says with snide accentuation, "it's not good to play in traffic. Gen-er-al-ly, when your gut feels a certain way, you better hightail it to the bathroom or you'll be wetting your pants."
But is every registered Democrat automatically liberal, anti-American, godless, a liar and a "girly boy" — plus guilty of treason? That's a generalization Coulter all but states outright in her book, but in the interview has trouble defending.
"Don't worry," she wants every Democrat to know. "The country doesn't prosecute for treason anymore. If they didn't prosecute Jane Fonda (news) (for visiting the enemy during the Vietnam War), there's no worries there."
She is lunching at an open-air Upper East Side bistro near the apartment she rents in Manhattan. (Coulter, who is single, makes her primary residence in Miami Beach, Fla. — "lots of Cubans," she airily explains.)
Though known for her sexy garb (on the cover of "Treason" her twiggy form is sheathed in a sleek black gown), she is dressed down in white jeans and gray T-shirt. She just finished her column. She has hours of radio interviews scheduled later. It's a sunny, breezy day and life is sweet. The only cloud on her horizon, says Coulter, bright-eyed and full of herself, is insufficient time to savor her success.
At 41, Coulter has traveled a well-plotted road from her comfy Republican upbringing in New Canaan, Conn., to Cornell University in upstate New York, then law school at the University of Michigan.
She worked for the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative public policy group, then took a job with Spencer Abraham (news - web sites), the current Energy Secretary who then was a U.S. senator from Michigan.
In the mid-1990s, she signed onto a project to investigate alleged wrongdoings by President and Mrs. Clinton, which in 1998 led to "High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (news - web sites)," Coulter's first best seller.
From there, it was a short step to punditry, where she was well-served by her looks and sharp tongue, winning further notoriety after being fired by MSNBC and National Review Online for her inflammatory remarks.
When it comes to getting people riled, "I really have a gift," she chuckles.
And never more than right now, though she easily dismisses those who find fault with "Treason" as "people who haven't read it."
In the case of Al Franken, at least, she's right. Contacted by phone, the liberal satirist takes pains to say he hasn't bothered to read "Treason" cover-to-cover. Even so, he can reel off problematic passages he says he found just by spot-checking.
Here's one: On pages 265-266, Coulter blasts New York Times writer Thomas Friedman for opposing racial profiling in a December 2001 column. She quotes (and credits) several passages that seem to back up her complaint.
But it turns out that Coulter misappropriated Friedman's words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column, as anyone who reads it will discover. His column actually drew the less-than-startling conclusion that a new age of terrorism threatens our personal safety and our free society.
"She's shameless," says Franken, who examines Coulter's earlier pronouncements in "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," which rests at No. 1 on the Times list of best sellers. Says Franken, "She deliberately misrepresents and distorts."
"I am giving an alternative view," states Coulter, reflecting mastery of a skill that, in "Treason," she lays on liberals: "infantile, logic-chopping games." It is how she struck gold — her artful, attention-grabbing game of argument for argument's sake.
"I'm not making that up!" she declares during lunch while pounding home yet another argument. Then, never one to doubt herself, she settles the matter with head-spinning proof: "It's in my book!"
But a substantial number of the linguistic, um, changes in American English I see today look a lot more like ignorance (read: poor education) than anything else. "Cigarets" or "sigret's," they tell me sumbodi dint lern ta spel "cigarettes."
No, "everything" is not, but there are a great many things that are, and Ann does an exquisite job of pointing some of them out.
That is one good Tag Line.
There are many things that I refrain from doing, even though I have a perfect right to do them.
Most of them are issues of politeness (not political correctness). I just don't enjoy cr*pping on people, no matter how much they may deserve it.
Those are just the same people who tell us not to say...
Stuartess--flight attendant
waitress--server
salesman--salesperson
african american--person of color.
Just more newspeak we conservatives should probably ignore.
And where did you ever learn to call it a cigaret?? My cigarettes right next to me dont have that.
this gold digging writer is accusing Ann of being a gold digging writer. how quaint.
if ya ain't got a realistic intellectual argument with Ann, just dig up some media whore angle...
and who would know better how to do that, than a media whore, huh, frazier? oh, and be sure to point out the fact she's a knockout...
that'll dissuade any other rational analysis of the book, ya arrogant sexist puke.
Silly me, I thought they were actually going to talk about her book.
Here's one: On pages 265-266, Coulter blasts New York Times writer Thomas Friedman for opposing racial profiling in a December 2001 column.
But it turns out that Coulter misappropriated Friedman's words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column, as anyone who reads it will discover. His column actually drew the less-than-startling conclusion that a new age of terrorism threatens our personal safety and our free society.
Actually his column drew the less-than-intellecually invigorating conclusion that we should all fly airplanes naked! He even called the editorial NAKED AIR
But in the less-than-humorous article he flatly opposes racial profiling. On the subject of flying naked he states QOUTE " It's much more civilized than racial profiling." Can it get more clear than that??? Does this mean he doesnt oppose racial profiling? Even though he claims public nudity is "more civilized"?!
Friedman even pussy-foots around the issue, and cannot bring himself to say ISLAM EXTREMIST, but instead says "religious fundamentalists of any stripe".
One thing Ann Coulter did not go into was that in the article, Friedman basically makes the case that we need a Global Authoritorian goverment to control everyone with an iron fist "or we simply learn to live with much higher levels of risk than we've ever been used to before."
Good suggestion Tom!
And never more than right now, though she easily dismisses those who find fault with "Treason" as "people who haven't read it." In the case of Al Franken, at least, she's right.
Did Mr. Moore here even bother to ask Ann Coulter about this ludicrous claim!? I would suspect not, i just disproved it with 5 minutes of research, i doubt Ann would have problem at all!
Perhaps thats why she "dismisses those who find fault with "Treason" as "people who haven't read it."" All the claims of those who find fault with the book can simply be dismissed by actually OPENING THE BOOK and RESEARCHING IT!!
Somebody Ping this, Yahoo and the Associated Press, Mr. Moore and Al Franken need to be exposed for what they are..
BIG FAT
LIARS
chudogg: oh i get it now, cigaret would be a gender neutral term! LOL!!!Actually, no, schoolchildren complained for years that the words cigarette and brunette had a useless te on the end. Those original words are, after all, French, you know.
chudogg: Stuartess--flight attendantNo, it's stewardess.
Cigar = male
cigarette = female
Coulter was on one of my regular talk shows last week. She said she referred to the father of somebody [forgotten]. A critic
said "it wasn't his father, go ahead, call and ask him". She researched it again, and it was the somebody's grandfather.
And I think she said she was wrong on complaining/whining about the NYTs failure to mention [Dale] Earnhardt's death.
The Slimes did have it on page one.
My, my, these mistakes certainly reveal the entire book as one big lie.
And while we're pointing out mistakes, I reread one of my replies from last week. I typed "who's" instead of "whose".
Can I still continue to reply to messages?
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