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!"
You are undoubtedly right about the culture and combat arms branch distinctions. I was Army and quasi-combat arms (instructor for a combat arms MOS).
The Cold War Consensus that existed from 1945 to the mid-1960s for starters. You did not see a lot of differences between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy issues during that time period. Almost total support among Democrats for the war in Afghanistan would be another reality ignored by Coulter.
Her argument (liberals are traitors because they always support America's enemies) falls apart when you consider the actions of the Democratic presidents and Democratic-controlled Congress during the first twenty to twenty-five years of the Cold War. The Democrats were just as anti-Communist as the Republicans.
As far as Cold War realities, how about the reality of the Democrats opposing Reagan at every turn as he fought to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union?
Why did a Democrat-controlled Congress pass Reagan's defense budget?
How about the reality of Democrats travelling to Cuba and extolling the virtues of Castro? How about the reality of Jim McDermott and that weasel from Michigan (Bonior) visiting Baghdad and sucking up to the vicious despot we removed from power?
Individual members of the Democratic Party
How about the realities of Democrats slashing defense and intelligence spending at every chance? The reality that Alger Hiss was a communist and had Roosevelt's ear? That the State Department was, in fact, rife with Soviet sympathizers and appeasers throughout the 50's and 60's.
Why did the Democrats support our efforts to contain Communism?
You mention the mid-60's as the point where the foreign policy view of the Democrats and Republicans begain to split, and you're absolutely correct. It was during the mid-60's that the Red Diaper babies began to solidify their power in the Democratic Party. It's been a long, slow move to the left for them since then.
We agree on this point. However, the same Democratic Party supported the war in Afghanistan.
China.
You could argue that the Democrats were just stupid, but i would bet there was a large group of Democrats in the party at that time that were aware of this and was activily supporting it.
How do you explain Truman implementing the policy of Containment and the Truman Doctrine?
This of course caused America to hand over Eastern Europe to Communist Russia as well as abandoning China to the reds.
We did not hand over Eastern Europe to the Communists. The Soviet Union "liberated" Eastern Europe and did not let go until 1989. Are you suggesting that we should have continued east and liberated Central and Eastern Europe? Americans would not have supported that bloodbath.
The Nationalists lost China to the Communists, not us.
But they did. Truman Doctrine and the policy of Containment happended on Truman's watch.
And honestly, how many Democrat congressman from, oh, say, 1972 on supported that part of our foreign policy? I can think of...well, let's see. Moynihan. Sam Nunn. Help me out here...
And yet they passed Reagan's defense budgets.
I am not that old (not there is anything wrong with that)! I was in the service from 1987 to 1991. Some of the senior NCOs did describe life in the Army during the late 1970s.
Of course, the last Carter budget did include a significant increase in defense spending.
How would you have gotten the Soviets out of Eastern Europe without starting a war against the largest land army in the world?
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