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.
Even if it is the truth? How about you doing some serious research on McCarthy. Watch some video of him and see what kind of man he was. When I was in school, he was on TV and my impression was that he was not someone I would trust. I still believe that but it is based upon more than just an impression.
While I like a few more curves as well, some people are just naturally thin. For her gaining thirty pounds would not be healthy. She's not gaunt, just thin. I doubt if you'd like the way she looked if she did gain thirty pounds, since most of it wouldn't be in the "right" places, most likly. Five or ten maybe, would fill her out a little, but she's fine the way she is as well. She's pretty, and more importantly she's both savy and smart. All that and you wnat pnuematic too?
I got the feeling he'd prefer her brother.
Last I checked, it isn't the business of the United States Senate to prosecute anyone. That's an executive branch responsibility, and what McCarty was trying to do was show was expecting them to do that at the time was like expecting the fox to zealously guard the chickens.
Powell is not "entrenched", he serves at the pleasure of the President. When a new President comes in, Powell will go, if not before. The pukes are civil servants and are very difficult to get rid of, hence they are "entrenched", more or less.
But he was "fully impeached". The fact that Senate refused to even look at any evidence, and did not convict him and remove him from office in that proceeding that passed for a "trial", does not change the fact that Billy Jeff may be forever referred to as "The Impeached One".
The Senate voted not to *convict* him of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors. The House had already *impeached* his sorry hide. It should have been for "Treason and Bribery" as well as "Other High Crimes and Misdomeanors".
See US Constitution, Art I sections 2 and 3, and also Art II section 4.
“Everything isn't black and white,” counters historian Radosh....
....but right and wrong ARE black and white, and shrill Liberal Socialist Pondscum (LSP) denials will not change this. Equally fictional are the contentions that Ann's research is suspect; anything which shows LSP in the light of truth is suspect as far as LSP are concerned! As Ann points out in Treason, screaming in protest and baseless personal attacks are the standard LSP techniques to counter truth, an example of which is "accurate research"!
The author of this article is, clearly, looking for a way to discredit Ann specifically and truth in general! How laughably typical about LSP!!
Often times medals are awarded based on "stock" criteria, such a completeling a given number of missions, or serving in a particular location for a certain number of days. Besides, the DFC is not awarded only for "uncommon courage in air combat" but also for "extraordinary achievement", in fact the criteria does not require combat at all, only that the event occur during aerial flight. Lindberg got one for flying the Atlantic, and even Amehilia Airheart got one, as did the Wright brothers, retroactively in their case.
After a little seraching around to try to find the *real* criteria used in WW-II. I gound the following:
Included was a medal Mulcahy couldn’t recall ever actually having had in his hand: the Distinguished Flying Cross awarded for completing 20 combat missions in the western Pacific between March 29 and June 19, 1945. “I had it on paper,” he recalled." here .
So apparently, in at least some cases, the DFC was awarded on the basis of combat missions flown. Undoubtably the "real" criteria has changed since WW-II, so your experience may be different.
Heavens to Murgatroy. I'll try that again.
After a little searching. I found the following:
Consider it done. Just had supper with my wife, a rare occurance, and then went to the supermarket. My wife lives 350 or so miles away. Or I should say I live I 350 miles from *her* and my younger daughter. Not marital problems, but rather the result of Clintonsizing in 1998. She travels a lot in her "job", and so gets down to see me more often than I get up to see them, but it's still not too often. Then I was busy on other threads, until I just punched "My Comments".
Why would Duz, well Duzzy, the son of a good friend of my Dad, who is now a two star general in the Army want to kidnap me? :)
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