, not 
(the legs on the former look kinda familiar, ne c'est pas?)
Posted on 10/19/2003 12:57:49 PM PDT by Forgiven_Sinner
In her book “Treason,” Ann Coulter lionizes Joseph McCarthy, the 1950s Wisconsin senator, for his holy war against Communist spies in the United States.
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism By Ann Coulter Crown Forum, $26.95
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, 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 (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 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, 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,” 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.
I am not part of that audience. I prefer authors who assume that their readers have normal reasoning skills.
, not (the legs on the former look kinda familiar, ne c'est pas?)
He did not manage to find anyone who could be prosecuted. Since there were clearly many who were "security risks" why should we "lionize" the leader of this unsucessful effort - especially since he did this unsuccessful job in a manner which allowed/required the Senate to condemn him?
How have I "smeared" McCarthy? I have only cited the fact that he was condemned by the Senate, he was unsucessful in finding anyone to prosecute and that he was challenged regarding his tactics.
This thread begins with the statement: In her book “Treason,” Ann Coulter lionizes Joseph McCarthy, the 1950s Wisconsin senator
I have taken issue with the "lionizing" of a senator who was condemned by the Senate. After being quite successful at bringing much attention to himself, he was completely unsuccessful at bringing charges against anyone and his efforts in this regard turned out to be counter-productive.
I can recall seeing him live on TV and thinking that he came across just like the union thug-bosses. I know that is not a scientific way of determining his character but he never did anything to alter my opinion.
LOL. You have a point there.
Frustrated by what they see as "shoddy scholarship" and widespread bias, two historians have presented a candid critique of their profession's treatment of Communist history. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr are the authors of the newly published book, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (Encounter Books). Haynes, who is 20th Century Political Historian at the Library of Congress, discussed the work at the September 25 AIM/McDowell Luncheon.
Haynes said that the book, which focuses more on historians than on history, is a "blunt and therapeutic" work intended to "spark debate" concerning the history profession's treatment of Communism.
Haynes began his talk with a basic chronology of Communist studies. When American scholarship on Communist history began in the 1950s, historians generally took a liberal but critical approach to Communism. Despite the lack of resources, Haynes stated, historians such as Theodore Draper produced works that were models of historical scholarship.
Matters changed greatly in the 1960s, Haynes said, when the history profession was infused with hundreds of radical scholars. These "revisionists," as they came to be known, began to rewrite much of the history of the Communist movement in America, casting it as a benign and natural evolution of the liberal tradition. The American Communist Party (CPUSA), the revisionists claimed, was an autonomous organization that received no subsidies or marching orders from Moscow. American Communists began to be portrayed in history books as noble idealists oppressed by capitalist America.
Over the next couple of decades, revisionism became more and more institutionalized in the history profession, and traditionalist historians-those who took a critical view of Communism-found it increasingly difficult to have their work published. The Journal of American History, for example, which bills itself as "the leading scholarly publication … in the field of American history," published its last traditionalist essay on this subject in 1972, Haynes stated.
The worldwide collapse of Communism, however, dealt a setback to revisionist dominance. After the fall of the USSR in 1991, historians gained access to a wealth of formerly classified Soviet documents. In 1992 Haynes and Klehr themselves began studying documents in the Comintern Archives in Moscow; there they found information devastating to the revisionist account of the history of American Communism. Moscow's subsidization of CPUSA, for example, was not right-wing paranoia (as revisionists had previously claimed), but indisputable fact: Haynes pointed to a note from former CPUSA Chairman Gus Hall acknowledging his receipt of $3 million from the Soviet Union.
In light of this and other powerful evidence, many revisionists have had to modify their treatment of Communist history, Haynes said. A few were so influenced by the Moscow records that they have even joined the traditionalist camp.
In general, however, revisionists have tried to salvage their portrait of Communist history by ignoring or distorting recent evidence, Haynes lamented. One historian, after finally admitting that Moscow had been subsidizing CPUSA, insisted that the subsidies were unimportant because they did not compromise the party's "autonomy." Another revisionist wrote that "thousands" were executed in the Stalinist Great Terror of the 1930s-literally true but greatly misleading, as records show that the death toll reached well into the millions.
Soviet espionage in America, Haynes said, is one area where many historians have been especially biased; in fact, the bulk of In Denial deals with this "lying about spying." Haynes himself has found (in Soviet telegraphs decrypted as part of the Venona Project) overwhelming evidence that hundreds of influential Americans-including high-ranking government officials Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White-served as spies for the USSR.
Faced with such revelations, revisionists have gone from denying Soviet espionage to rationalizing or redefining it, Haynes reported. These American Communists were not spies, some of them insist, they were just internationally minded "progressives" who "exchanged information" with their friends from Russia. Some revisionists go so far as to claim that by helping to break the atomic monopoly and restrain American "aggression," Soviet spies contributed to world peace and even helped the U.S. (If that was the case, Haynes quipped, maybe America should have joined the Soviets in awarding the spies medals.)
Thus, although traditionalist historians have gained some ground since 1991, revisionism is still alive and kicking, Haynes asserted. In fact, revisionists still dominate history faculties and academic journals, and some traditionalists have left the field of Communist history due to intimidation or lack of publishing opportunities. Among the news media, too, there is a subtle pro-Communist bias. Haynes spoke of his frustration with, in particular, New York Times obituaries, where known Communists are not identified as such and are depicted more as victims than as villains.
Historians' continued denials of Communist treachery, and their tolerance of biased and deficient scholarship, constitute an "intellectually and morally sick situation" in the history profession, Haynes charged. He hopes that his blunt book will force historians to confront and alter the way they deal with Communism in their work.
But the issue, Haynes claimed, is of importance not just to historians. By presenting a sanitized, romantic history of Communism, revisionists help to pave the way for future radical and totalitarian movements. (As George Orwell wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.") All those who value truth and appreciate the lessons of history would do well to read In Denial.
Sean Grindlay is an intern at Accuracy in Media. He can be contacted at sean.grindlay@aim.org
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