I need to re-read Treason. Great book!
Let me or knews_hound know if you'd like to be added to the Ann Coulter ping list.
later
Smooth.......
;-)
Most importantly, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy was RIGHT.
The Venona transcripts, plus other secret US documents now unsealed, PLUS data now available from the former Soviet Union, along with confessions from its spies, show the US Government WAS penetrated by HUNDREDS of Soviet Agents..in the State Dept, the White House, and the Pentagon. I don’t know HOW we survived!
She needs to eat a smitch. ;-)
later
First, thanks for the post! GREAT READ!
Its a shame someone so brilliant and knowledgeable somehow believes presenting herself as combination of Britney Spears and Al Sharpton is somehow good for her message. By engaging in that kind of rhetoric she significantly reduces her audience and effectiveness of her message.
Having said that, I enjoyed her insights on McCarthy. I have always assumed Senator McCarthy was a great American. I ought to educate myself even further and read a bit more about him.
Anyone know what would be a good book, besides Coulter’s to learn about REAL McCarthy? Thanks in advance.
Exactly! They fought like the cornered Rats that they were.
Thanks for the great post.
Treason is a must read.
Damn, that chick can write.
The vilification of McCarthy was the model that has been applied repeatedly and pretty much perfected at this point. It worked very well on the Bush administration, and will always be effective when and where the media is a willing conspirator.
It really comes from Lenin in “State and Revolution” and elsewhere. You’ll see it used on McCain in such way to neutralize this “Obama and his preacher” flare-up, which I’m betting will first end up a net-gain for the Obamites in their battle with the Clintonistas and then a wash later on when up against McCain.
The other interesting aspect of the McCarthy era was his effect on Moscow and KGB tradecraft in colonizing the West.
The act of identifying signed-up communists in Hollywood and elsewhere forced Moscow to abandon the straight-forward effort to register people in CPUSA. The movement went underground and surreptitious as a response to McCarthy.
In 1972, Hillary Rodham didn’t have to join CPUSA to get her law clerking job with Red Robert Treuhaft. In 1952, even 1960, she probably would have been forced to sign up. Thus, she might have been eliminated from electoral politics thereafter.
Like someone else here said, McCarthy was on to more than he realized or was prepared to deal with.
Well, first a disclaimer - Sheryl Crow vs Ann Coulter is like throwing retarded kittens to an alligator. You know how it's going to end and it ain't gonna be pretty.
That said, I'm with Ann on this one - not all of them, but this one to be sure. People who arrogate to themselves the right to kill 3000 innocent people to make a point have already dictated the terms of the relationship. It is neither irrational nor "unfair" to happen to be better at killing them than they are at killing us. While desperate cries of moral equivalency and invocations of past sins serve to muddy the water they really don't address the main point - if they're dead they can't do it again.
One wonders sometimes at the weird moral asymmetry that results in the notion that them killing us is justified where our killing them back is not. The rules regarding justification turn out to be incredibly plastic, but not the rule of a 500-lb bomb impacting the goat dip at a terrorist soiree. It's a little difficult to re-frame that one. The inherent inflexibility of that is no doubt anathema to the enlightened liberal mind but it works wonders for making Abdul aware that two can play at his game but that only one can win. What is most difficult to understand is why this seems to be so difficult to understand.
mark
I need to re-read Treason. Great book!
Let me or knews_hound know if you'd like to be added to the Ann Coulter ping list.
Spot on. Way to go Ann.
Besides, McCarthy was more concerned with communist infiltration into the higher levels of military and civilian command, and time has proven that he was correct.
The really sad (and scary) thing is that there's an active campaign to whitewash and even rehabilitate the reputations of known communist operatives! The best example would be of the Rosenbergs.
Mark
“McCarthy was a popularizer, a brawler. Republican elitists abhor demagogic appeals to working-class Democrats. Fighting like a Democrat is a breach of etiquette worse than using the wrong fork. McCarthy is sniffed at for not playing by Marquis of Queensbury Rules — rules of engagement demanded only of Republicans. Well without McCarthy, Republicans might be congratulating themselves on their excellent behavior from the gulag right now.” — Ann Coulter, P. 70
This one alone is worth the price of the book. And how incredibly true is it now, with McCain advising no one even mention Obama’s middle name! Any day now we’ll hear that it was actually a FReeper who leaked his middle name to Drudge.
Ping
100 TERRORISTS SURVEYED... TOP TEN ANSWERS ON THE BOARD... HERE’S THE QUESTION:
Posted By Deebow
Can it be empirically proven that the Libtard Left in alliance with the Democrat Party are actually emboldening our enemies by trashing our war effort and the efforts of our soldiers?
For us Poli/Sci International Relations geeks, polls and surveys and studies are something we end up immersing ourselves in somewhere after the beginning of our masters work and we emerge out of it right after our Ph. D dissertation. We spend our time analyzing (in the abstract) things like; “whether or not post-modern Marxism contributed to the perceived downfall of the idea of useful socialism and the effect it had on native peoples in sub-Saharan Africa in the immediate post colonial era.”
Yeah, I know, the sure cure for insomnia.... Almost feel asleep in a puddle of drool just writing that part.
But every once in awhile, a piece of research comes along that sounds the horn of truth that we all know to be true, but they back it up with some good research and facts and figures...
The National Bureau of Economic Research has published an interesting paper by Radha Iyengar at the Center for Government and International Studies at Harvard University, and Jonathan Monten, an International Security Program Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs with the Kennedy School of Government.
And they posit an interesting question... Are insurgents affected by information on US casualty sensitivity?
The answer they found was something we already know...
Their abstract from the website was:
Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an “emboldenment” effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such, counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.
I do not agree with the last premise in that statement (emphasis mine), because I think you have to have both strategies (Kinetic and non-Kinetic) in order to effectively destroy an insurgency. That is a topic for another day.
That notwithstanding, the researchers findings in their study were:
First, the findings suggest that there is an explicit and quantifiable cost to public debate during wartime in the form of increased attacks. Based on these results, it appears that Iraqi insurgent groups believe that when the U.S. political landscape is more uncertain, initiating a higher level of attacks increases the likelihood that the U.S. will reduce the scope of its engagement in the conflict.
Second, the insurgent response to low resolve periods may not represent an overall increase in the total number of attacks, but rather a change in the timing of attacks. Because it may be difficult and costly to increase the frequency of attacks in a particular time period, insurgent groups may only seek to do this when the returns are sufficiently high. New information about U.S. cost-sensitivity increases the perceived return to violence and thus insurgent groups condense the violence they would have committed over several weeks into a shorter time horizon.
Third, regardless of whether the observed effect represents an overall increase or intertemporal substitution, the evidence in this study indicates that insurgent groups are strategic actors that respond to the incentives created by the policies and actions of the counterinsurgent force, rather than groups driven by purely ideological concerns with little sensitivity to costs.
And finally...
The arguments and evidence presented in this paper suggest that insurgent groups do appear to respond to U.S. cost-sensitivity. The result is that insurgents attack more frequently and kill or injure more U.S. service men and women.
The salient point, is when cowardly Democrats, empty headed movie stars, drugged up delusional hippies or phony soldiers step in front of news cameras and say things like “The Surge is a failure” or “The Iraqis have to step up and do more” or “our troops murdered those people in cold blood because of the stress they are under” the Democrat Party, the Code Pink freaks, The ANSWER Crowd, et. al. cause the death of more American Soldiers by emboldening our enemies to attack us and to continue to fight on, in the hopes of driving us from the battlefield.
I know that world class losers like Medea Benjamin, Jack Murtha, Harry Reid or Jeese Beauchamp won’t ever get the point of their traitorous comments and I will probably see pigs flying around the moon before any of them will apologize for their statements.
But I do want the IVAW to remember this study and it’s conclusions when they start their Winter Soldier (Redux) Testimony farce and tell stories about how they saw (insert war crime here) and participated in (insert war crime here) and I want them especially to think about all of their comrades (some that I am certain they are still friends with) who are still walking patrol in Diyala, Muqdadiyah, and Anbar and conducting operations in Musa Qala, Zormat, Kolagu, Bermel and the Korengal.
I want them to know that we can prove not only anecdotally, but empirically, that the things they say can and will have an effect on the actions of our enemies in our fight against them.
And like the Swift Boat Vets, we too will not forget....
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/03/lies-damn-lies.html