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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
Ann Coulter is every thinking man's dream girl.
Only a Liberal or a moron would attempt to discredit the two rising stars of the Conservative movement - Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn.
They are exquisite, brilliant, telegenic, humorous, exciting.
Libs have absolutely no one to compare.
No wonder they are so worried!
BTTT!
In order to be a good liberal you have to find a reason for life besides God--ANYTHING. What you and Pout fail to realize is that Ann isn't debunking evolution as a natural process, she's debunking it as a faith. Evolutionists find any link, no matter how tenuous, and any explanation, no matter how ridiculous, proof of their theories. It doesn't matter what other laws are broken (2nd Law of Thermo comes to mind...) as long as they can explain it away. Evolutionists will take us all the way back to the beginning to... well... anything but God. For them there is no God, no creator, just random processes that gave us modern civilization out of... randomness.
Just as Christianity starts with God's creation, so the nihilists of faith in evolution have to start with... nothing. It is foundational and every bit a BELIEF system as religion. One difference, though... God Himself came to Earth in the person of Jesus Christ and affirmed his majesty and authority. From age to age, He hasn't changed and neither has His message. On the contrary, what was written centuries before His Holy Incarnation came true to the smallest detail in our time. The nihilists start from today and work backward and still have... nothing.
I would argue that God's Law rule and have never been debunked (despite millenia of attempts) and the evolutionists theories rely more tenuously on belief.
I don't believe you are really trying to use the 2nd Law argument! I truly find it hard to believe that you know so little science that you could do this.
My advice is to spend a few days on the science websites, and avoid the creation "science" sites for a while. What those sites do to science is ludicrous, and there are few things you will find there more ludicrous than the 2nd Law argument.
Her short essays in polemic are quite good.
Coulter would do better to stick to them, and try to remember to target only those who actually merit such treatment.
She erred -in profusion- in her assault on evolutionary science.
oh, dear, another argument against a strawman.
pgyanke, are you capable of EVER stating things honestly?
I have explicitly stated that I am displeased with Coulter's ERRORS OF FACT, SLOVENLY CITATIONS, and INACCURATE/DISTORTED PRESENTATION.
At what point have I EVER insisted that Coulter is wrong based on her refusal to accept the ToE?
NEVER.
At what point have I castigated YOU for refusing to accept the ToE?
NOT ONCE.
What have I hammered you with, in fact? Your constant refusal to specify exactly how many examples of Coulter's errors you desire, what degree of refutation of those errors you require to be coerced to publicly admit they are indeed errors, and/or a commitment to explain exactly what fault you find in those refutations should you decide to claim they are not compelling.
With every successive distortion and excuse you put forth, you become ever more fully the servant of my purposes on this thread.
I am not in the business of trying to teach a pig to sing when it serves my purposes just as well to allow a pig to wallow in its own filth before all the world.
Do you get it now? If you accept the terms of the challenge, you serve my purposes. If you refuse to accept the terms of the challenge, you serve my purposes. If -at this point- you flee, you serve my purposes. If, instead, you scream for help, you serve my purposes.
It is entirely up to you to decide which way of serving my purposes causes you the least damage. In my opinion, your best option is to accept the terms of the challenge.
You had your chance--I didn't waste time reading your post. Take a hike.
Yet another distortion: it is YOU who have squandered many chances, and have done so yet again. You serve my purposes, costing me no effort. Continue, or choose more wisely.
Great! Are you going to back this up?
Evolution in no way breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Actually it does. The argument against says that life isn't governed by this law. How about the creation of life? I'm not arguing about the process of evolution, as I pointed out above. I am arguing about its beginning. Where does life begin? For the strict evolutionist, there comes a point where one moment there wasn't life and the next there is... THIS violates the 2nd Law of Thermo. I agree life is an open system. However, before there was life, there was entropy. It certainly violates the 2nd Law of Thermo that complex life could come from a system evolving toward inert uniformity.
Nothing you said in the above is correct.
Did you check the link? Thank you for the insulting tone... may I please have another?
I am. See post #291.
Buzz off, junior. We're having a discussion here.
I am. See post #291.
...the thermodynamics argument is one of the very worst creationists have ever used. The argument is wrong, of course. But more than that it is wrong in a way that betrays an extreme simple-mindedness about science in general and physics in particular. Consequently, among scientists the thermodynamics argument has become a symbol for the sort of mind-numbing ignorance that is the stock-in-trade of creationists.
actually, no: you are not having a discussion - you are having your head handed to you by one who favors different tactics than I.
and you are STILL serving my purposes handily.
do carry on.
"Great! Are you going to back this up?"
King Prout already listed a number of her lies. You have yet to counter him on any point.
Evolution fails the priciples of the 2nd Law of Thermo in the creation process. There is no process known where a system evolving toward a "state of inert uniformity" explodes into complexity due to the addition of sunlight.
Let's take another approach... Occam's Razor (I know this has gotten much abused since the movie "Contact", however...). Is it more likely...
The Earth cooled. Life spontaneously occurs at the molecular level. This life evolves to become complex organisms in the sea first, then land. Somewhere along the way, this life finds a way to take flight and becomes birds. An ape stands upright and goes on to dominate the planet.
or
What God Himself told us was true. He created the Earth and its environments and then filled them with appropriate organisms. That He created variety through natural selection and adaptation doesn't contradict His Word or purpose.
In one scenario, life is a cosmic accident devoid of meaning. Man is but the most advanced of the simians and will take a dirt nap at his end just to be food for the plants and bugs. In God's reality, man is created in His image and likeness and has a purpose to his life and his death beyond simple fertilizer.
I'm on God's side. Where science falters, He does not.
Got a link?
I could sum up your post as "cause I said so". I'm convinced.
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