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.
The press revolted as well, with Edward Murrow of early television fame showing plain, unedited clips from the hearings to show the fraud in McCarthy.
Over the span of thirty-six days, there were thirty-two witnesses, 71 half-day sessions, 187 hours of TV air time, 100,000 live observers, and two million words of testimony.19 Joe kept up his attacks, which gradually weakened. Every day, millions of TV sets showed McCarthy pointing his finger yet again at another man. McCarthy was obviously slipping, but he didn't give up. Then, when he was attacking an associate of Joseph N. Welch, chief attorney for the Army, Welch stood up, faced the senator, and said:
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?
And with that, the hearings ended, and so did McCarthy's witch hunting career. On December 2, 1954, the senate voted 67-22 to condemn him for "conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions." The condemnation—only the third one in 165 years—noted the abuse of his Senatorial powers. After the condemnation, he tried to pass a few of bills written by him, but most senators didn't approve these, probably to avoid association with the "worst senator". He had lost his honor, and rightly so.
McCarthy was a drunken clown who was an embarrassment to this country. Why Ann can't figure this out is puzzling.
Source of the excerpt: http://mccarthy.cjb.net/
Ah, but would you be ready for her critique when you were done?
Yes, but only because of the acoustic similarities.
Certainly not in the Homeric sense.
Most correct and you help make my point. The ends can not justify the means and McCarthy obviously did not have the substance to figure that out. Why Ann thinks he is worthy of adulation is, again, very puzzling.
Barbarella pix acceptable as an alternative.
Oh yes, what is quoted is accurate. Read some more of the referenced source; it will give you a better idea of what McCarthy was about (mostly ego). Ann should have picked a better hero - this one could not even figure out that the ends do no justify the means (a basic moral principle).
JFK was an admirer.
Just being right is not enough - as the Senate Censure indicated. The ends do not justify the means. That is a basic moral principle and if you can't figure out that you do not deserve to be a Senator much less a hero (as Ann has tried to make him).
Here is a brief description of Ann's hero......written by a typical McCarthy-basher.
Your post reflects the "truth" which has been taken as gospel by many - on both the left AND right, until Ann's new book.Until you are able to read "Treasson" - here is a small taste of her argument, from:
I dare call it treason (SLAMMING LIBERALS AND DEMOCRATS BUT GOOD) (Ann Coulter)
World Net Daily ^ | 6/25/2003 | Ann Coulter
Posted on 06/25/2003 4:22 PM PDT by TLBSHOW
I DARE CALL IT TREASON
BY ANN COULTER
The myth of "McCarthyism" is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis. As Whittaker Chambers said: "[I]nnocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does."
At the time, half the country realized liberals were lying. But after a half century of liberal myth-making, even the disgorging of Soviet and American archives half a century later could not overcome their lies. In 1995, the U.S. government released its cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges. Naturally, therefore, the release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times. It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of "McCarthyism." They were not so innocent after all, it turns out.
Soviet spies in the government were not a figment of right-wing imaginations. McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. He was tilting at an authentic communist conspiracy that had been laughed off by the Democratic Party...
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