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.
Liberal fat chicks rarely fly F-14s. Lighten up.
Was he admiring while he was botching up the bay of pigs or while he was high on pain killers or while he was bringing us to the edge of nuclear war or while was cheating on his wife? Of what value does JFK admiration bring to this discussion?
"Treasson" in my previous post should have been "Treason"
JFK was an honest anti-Communist. I admire JFK for that. JFK admired McCarthy for being what he was: a staunch and effective anti-Communist.
Source of the excerpt: http://mccarthy.cjb.net/"
You didn't have to work to hard to come up with the few paragraphs that you linked us to. It bills itself as the "Home of the net's most popular report on Joe McCarthy."
It doesn't claim to be the most accurate. By the way, did you check out that site thoroughly. The guy is VERY "out there...
Do what several other people have suggested and read Ann's book. I did, and it amazed me how many "facts" have been twisted by the media that hated McCarthy.
Ummm....I read "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" as well as "Slander" and found that Ann is exremely careful to document her references in footnotes. She backsup all the facts..then draws her conclusions.
Unless we fight for proper treatment of history and counter the nonsense images of McCarthy, no history can be safe from the liberal noise machine. Someday, school children will be taught that all of America cringed with terror at Ken Starr, whose evil designs on the nation were frustrated only through the sacrifice of brave liberals. People will have vivid images of the pounding boots of Starr's subpoena-servers and the Gestapo-like wails of alarms as Ken Starr arrived to kick in the doors of innocent Americans and storm through their bedrooms. It will be the Reign of Terror under Ken Starr.
Bill Clinton will be revered in high school history books as the George Washington of his day who, along with patriots Larry Flynt and James Carville, "saved the Constitution." He will be honored with a memorial larger than the Washington Monument (though probably with the same general design).
Anyone who thinks this is anywhere near reality has mush for brains.
There is an interesting parallel here however: Both these individuals were "censured" by a legislative body. McCarty was condemned by the Senate and Clinton was impeached by the House.
Try reading the reference cited earlier: http://mccarthy.cjb.net
Then she goes on to not mention how all the Democrats sucked up to the Ortegas when they came to Washington.
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