Posted on 11/17/2003 3:23:22 PM PST by Forgiven_Sinner
Ann Coulter spoke at the University of Colorado in Boulder, drew a full house at Macky Auditorium, spent the better part of the night bashing Democrats and "liberals," provoked derision on the left and cheers on the right, and then departed.
If the effects of her talk resembled those of her best-selling books, many of Coulter's listeners went home with their positions a little more set in stone, a little more ready to think the worst of their political opponents. Hard-line conservatives take pleasure in watching Coulter infuriate liberals. Hard-line liberals hear her speak and decide that their adversaries are crazier than they had ever dreamed.
It's all a smooth exercise in hell-raising, calculated to drive a deeper wedge between factions in a country more divided than at any time since the 1960s. It has almost nothing to do with the serious debate that ought to take place in this country, and at this university, between liberals and conservatives.
Demonizing the Other Guy is marketable in 2003. Anyone who glances at the best-seller lists, or pauses over the talk shows of television and radio, knows that. No one on the political left or right plays the game with more sass than Coulter, who has parlayed her sarcastic wit, blonde good looks and simplistic liberal-bashing into fame and big bucks. She's a television commentator and writer whose best-selling works include "Treason," a book dedicated to the proposition that Democrats and liberals (the two tend to merge, strangely, in her work) hate their own country and side instinctively with its enemies.
Other insights of similar depth await those who take Coulter at face value as a serious writer. One of the central premises of "Treason" is that Sen. Joe McCarthy, the discredited and demagogic communist-hunter of the 1950s, was a great American. "In his brief fiery ride across the landscape, he bought America another 30 years" in the Cold War, Coulter writes.
That's a crock, and an embarrassment to honest conservatives. David Horowitz, whose advocacy of an "Academic Bill of Rights" is making waves in Colorado, respects Coulter and defends much of her work — but even he can't stomach her treatment of McCarthy, or her blithe assertion that his "fundamental thesis was absolutely correct: the Democratic party had fallen to totalitarianism."
Unlike the author of "Treason," Horowitz dismisses sweeping generalizations about Democrats. (Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were traitors?) He also points out that Coulter is "just wrong" about the political impact of Joe McCarthy, who "exploited the anti-communist sentiment that was already the popular wisdom of the time" — and impaired serious debate about communism for at least a generation after his death.
Coulter also wrote a book called "Slander" in which she charged, among other things, that liberals are uncivil in debate. We're all for robust discussion, folks — but there are certain things no one should have to endure, and one of them is a lecture on civility from Ann Coulter. She once described all liberals as "savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans and lie for sport," and likened Katie Couric to Hitler's mistress, describing her as "the affable Eva Braun of morning TV."
We have no quarrel with the decision to invite Ann Coulter to campus. We only hope that no one mistakes her appearance for serious debate between liberals and conservatives. If the university wants to foster that debate, it can find and promote more thoughtful conservative speakers, individually or in joint appearances with liberals.
Coulter is a celebrity hell-raiser — at best an entertaining sideshow, at worst an impediment to debate. If the general tone of public discourse ever descends to her level, the country is in serious trouble. We don't know whether that will ever happen — but if it does, we know what Coulter will say. She'll blame it all on liberals.
His main source of criticism is David Horowitz who at least bothered to read her books. I don't know if this anonymous critic read any or attended her speech at UC.
Considering that they don't even believe in reality, that's a compliment.
The article is garbage. Democrats are guilty of treason, and there are Republicans who are guilty as well.
I cannot comment with authority concerning McCarthy. I have read Coulter's two recent books. She is caustic, and brilliant. If she were a liar or a libeler, we would know for sure, because the Media would not rest that case.
There is the proof. The silence is deafening!
I love Ann Coulter.
McLuhan may have appropriated her line, some decades later, no info on that point.
It amazes me that the side that produce James Carville, amongst many others, has the gaul to consider Ann excessive.
Ann Coulter is able to deliver salvo's at the left, but unlike the left, her salvo's are backed up with cold hard facts.
The left lacks the balls to go head to head against her. They would do so only if they could control the situation (crowd & moderator).
So, having said that, why does he believe (how does does he justify his prejudiced dogma?) that Ann WAS NOT engaging in a serious debate between conservatives and liberals?
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