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Posted on 06/21/2006 9:17:55 AM PDT by RonDog
MARK STEYN MARK STEYN Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it's been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn't that great?" and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer. But nobody's talking too much about the finer points of Miss Coulter's argument. Instead, everyone -- from Hillary Rodham Clinton down -- is going bananas about a couple of paragraphs on page 103 and 112 in which the author savages the 9/11 widows. Not all of them. Just the quartet led by Kristen Breitweiser and known as "the Jersey Girls." These four widows have been regular fixtures in the New York TV studios since they first emerged to complain that the average $1.6 million-per-family compensation was insufficient. The 9/11 commission, in all its ghastly second-guessing showboating, was largely their project. As Miss Coulter writes: "These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." And at that point Senator Clinton jumped in to denounce the incendiary blond commentatrix as (dread word) "mean-spirited." Maybe so. But in 2004, the Jersey Girls publicly endorsed John Kerry's campaign for president: they inserted themselves into the political arena and chose sides. That being so, to demand that they be insulated from the normal rough 'n' tumble of partisan politics merely because of their biography seems absurd. There are any number of 9/11 widows. A few are big George W. Bush supporters, many are apolitical. I was honoured to receive an email the other day from Deena Gilbey, a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center and remained in the building to help evacuate his colleagues. A few days later, U.S. Immigration sent Mrs. Gilbey a letter informing her that, as she was now a widow, her residence status had changed and they were enclosing a deportation order. Having legally admitted to the country the men who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act after having enabled his murder is to further traumatize the bereaved. The heartless brain-dead bonehead penpusher who sent out that letter is far more "mean-spirited" than Miss Coulter at full throttle. Yet Mrs. Gilbey isn't courted by the TV bookers the way the Jersey Girls are. Hundreds of soldiers' moms believe their sons died in a noble and just cause in Iraq, but it's Cindy Sheehan, who calls Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world," who gets speaking engagements across America, Canada, Britain, Europe and Australia. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi winds up pushing up daisy cutters, the media don't go to Paul Bigley, who rejoiced that the man who decapitated his brother would now "rot in hell," nor the splendid Aussie Douglas Wood, who called his kidnappers "arseholes," nor his fellow hostage Ulf Hjertstrom, a Swede who's invested 50,000 bucks or so in trying to track down the men who kidnapped him and visit a little reciprocal justice on them. No, instead, the media rush to get the reaction of Michael Berg, who thinks Bush is "the real terrorist" rather than the man who beheaded his son. But it wasn't until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry's pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush's Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he's still down there. It's gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can't attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you've got most of your arms and legs and he hasn't. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn't have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry's speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, "If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards." "What crackpot argument can't be immunized by the Left's invocation of infallibility based on personal experience?" wonders Miss Coulter of Cleland, Sheehan, the Jersey Girls and Co. "If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we're allowed to respond to?" Now that's a point worth making. As it is, thanks to Coulter cracks like "Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy," even chaps on the right are doing the more-in-sorrow shtick and saying that they've been making the same basic argument as Ann and it's such a shame she had to go too far with her cheap shots because that's discredited the entire argument, etc. The trouble with this line is that hardly anyone was objecting to the professional widow routine pre-Coulter. Well, that's not strictly true. Yours truly objected. After the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, I wrote: "The first reaction of the news shows to the verdict was to book some relative of the 9/11 families and ask whether they were satisfied with the result, as if the prosecution of the war on terror is some kind of national-security Megan's Law on which they have inviolable proprietorial rights. Sorry, but that's not what happened that Tuesday morning. The thousands who died were not targeted as individuals: they were killed because they were American, not because somebody in a cave far away decided to murder Mrs. Smith. . . It's not about 'closure' for the victims; it's about victory for the nation." But nobody paid the slightest heed to this line. For all the impact my column had, I might as well have done house calls. Then Coulter comes in and yuks it up with the Playboy-spread gags, and suddenly the Jersey Girls only want to do the super-extra-fluffy puffball interviews. So two paragraphs in Ann Coulter's book have succeeded in repositioning these ladies: they may still be effective Democrat hackettes, but I think TV shows will have a harder time passing them off as non-partisan representatives of the 9/11 dead. So, on balance, hooray for Miss Coulter. If I were to go all sanctimonious and priggish, I might add that, in rendering their "human shield" strategy more problematic, she may be doing Democrats a favour. There's no evidence the American people fall for this shtick: in 2002, the party's star Senate candidates all ran on biography -- Max Cleland, Jean Carnahan (the widow of a deceased governor), and Walter Mondale (the old lion pressed into service after Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash). All lost. Using "messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to" doesn't solve the Democrats' biggest problem: their message. The Dems, says the author, have "become the 'Lifetime' TV network of political parties." But, except within the Democrat-media self-reinforcing cocoon, it's not that popular. A political party with a statistically improbable reliance on the bereaved shouldn't be surprised that it spends a lot of time in mourning -- especially on Wednesday mornings every other November. To comment, email letters@macleans.ca
Ann Coulter: America's fiery, blond commentatrix
June 21, 2006 One crack about 9/11 widows and the author of Godless loses her audience. Too bad.
Copyright by Rogers Media Inc.
May not be reprinted or republished without permission.
This story can be found at:
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060626_129699_129699
and before I bother to do that kind of work, I require you to publicly agree to the terms of the challenge, so that - when your requirements are met- you will have the choice between honoring your word by admitting Coulter's writings on evolutionary science are bogus or, instead, proving you care nothing at all for factual accuracy if it gets in the way of your polemic and luddite agenda.
So far, only ONE of those who have engaged me on this thread has agreed to the terms. He has received from me information fulfilling his requirements. It has been a few days. I have not heard back from him, but I expect that when I do he shall be a man and admit that Coulter's work has some very severe flaws in its assertions, citations, and fact-checking.
All you need to do is agree to the terms, pgyanke, and I will give you the same information I gave him. The choice is, and ever has been, yours to make.
You may or may not realise what I have been doing with you here on this thread. Others certainly do.
They'll always be afraid.
well, ONE of 'em has showed he has a spine, at least.
he, at least, I have some respect for.
these others who continue to avoid agreeing to concrete terms... feh.
their only use to me is as highly illustrative public exemplars of what endemic ills infest the thinking and debating strategies of the creationist camp.
Let me see if I understand you correctly... You've been primping and strutting on this thread for days that you've got the goods on Ann Coulter. Then when it comes time to put it out there, you do it by FReepmail?! Color me unimpressed.
Ann put her work out there for all to take pot shots at. So far, I haven't seen anyone successfully take her on point for point. If you have something already prepared, let's see it. Don't put it out to select individuals, put it in the public domain and let your critics take a swing at it. Anything less doesn't even rise to the level of pathetic.
And before you come back with another call for a pledge of some kind--save it. If you convince me on even one point, I will acknowledge it. However, I'm not about to take a pledge regarding work I haven't seen. Put it out there and let's have a debate that gets beyond the level of a child on a playground telling us how his daddy can beat up anybody.
Steyn & Coulter.
Bumping SO many FReeper comments that are OUTSTANDING!
:o)
Feel like sharing with the rest of the class?
Bump for lunchtime read. :)
The good King reports that research is underway, and still on-going. Other than that, I have nothing else to report, but if the King so requests, I'll share his work with all.
CA....
Well, King Pout? Can Chances Are share what you shared with him in great secrecy? Can we all finally see your cards from somebody with the guts to actually post them?
I will only debate with those who have the spine to agree to the terms.
Those who do not have the spine, I use as an illustration of spinelessness.
You in particular have had days and days in which to agree to the terms. You have not. So you don't get "the goods" - you get the shaft.
Whining about my tactics will profit you nothing.
Agree to the terms, or be treated as I see fit.
pgyanke,
Chances Are can of course do as he sees fit. I would prefer that he not give you the information I sent him until you grow a spine and agree to the terms.
Care to post a copy of the contract you signed with Ann Coulter before you read her book?
Of course, that would be ludicrous, wouldn't it?
Oh, and Pout? Don't give me the tired line that it isn't worth your effort to do the research if I'm not going to take some silly pledge. You've supposedly already done some work, right? Let's see it and have a real debate...
pgyanke,
With your every successive post, refusing to grow a spine, you form an ever more perfect example of the kind of creationist proponent who makes political conservatives look like a pack of idiots.
I have been debating creationists for quite a few years, and it is ever a puzzlement how very hard it is to cajole or coerce or trick a creationist into stipulating:
1. Exactly what he himself thinks a specific word, term, or theory means;
2. Precisely what he'd consider sufficient falsification of any particular creationist statement that he'd publicly abandon it;
3. Exactly how many such falsifications it'd take, or what proportion of a creationist guru's spiel being demonstrated patently false, that he'd be willing to accept that the creationist guru is, in fact, a liar;
4. That he's made a mistake;
5. That he's been lied to;
6. That he made a statement or declaration without being in full posession of the facts;
7. That he repeated a canard or myth without checking its factuality;
8. That no one religion has any more empirically verifiable claim to accuracy than another;
9. That there really isn't any "scientific" evidence for any religious belief;
10. That, okay, there really IS evidence for evolution;
11. That, okay, there really isn't any evidence for sudden, recent, or special creation;
12. That, okay, there really isn't any evidence supporting the occurance of a global flood within human history;
13. To define, precisely, what the term "kind" means in biological and taxonomic terms;
14. To define, precisely, what they believe is the threshold beyond which "microevolution" cannot go (to become "macroevolution");
15. To define, precisely, by what mechanism "microevolution" is prevented from becoming "macroevolution";
et cetera...
Far too many of you creation proponents refuse to define your terms, agree to standards of debate, or provide criteria which, if fulfilled, will force you to admit you have erred.
It isn't even simply that you don't value knowledge - it is as if you also place no value on honesty, that you are so wrapped up in your worldview that you cannot ever allow for any possibility that you'll set for yourselves a concrete threshold beyond which you'll be forced to reassess what you believe.
Unlike some of the other pro-science posters, I do not have the patience to keep giving free educations to the adamantly ineducable. Either you agree to terms which will force you to learn, or I will continue to provide you with opportunity to display your utter spinelessness before the world.
As stated before, repeatedly: The choice is yours.
So... in order to even begin having a discussion to see why you insult Ann Coulter's scholarship, I have to agree that I'm an ignorant knuckledragger? Can you do anything but harrass people? I'm not convinced of a positive answer.
Contrary to your obvious bias against those who trust in God, I was actually looking forward to see how this debate would go. I enjoy being challenged... it makes the world more interesting. It's been fascinating to me to be called "spineless" for staying with this topic this long while you continually refuse to post anything worth discussing.
This thread has lost all challenge and interest for me. I'll check back from time to time to see whether your work can stand the light of day. Anyone reading this thread can see that I tried very hard to ferret a conversation out of you to no avail.
no complete record has been found, might not ever be found, and might not exist to be found.
This sounds like the definition of faith to me. Something that can't be found, and might not exist, but is still the proof of the position. St Thomas Aquinas used a similar argument to "prove" the eternal existence of God.
scientists and science do not deal in proof.
Science deals in evidence -however partial or incomplete- and explanations of those evidence.
But, but, but - I just quoted you saying that there is no evidence to explain what you had been asked to explain.
And you will notice that I put the word "prove" in quotes, for the same reason.
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