Screed (Is Coulter doing a disservice to Conservatives?)

Spinsanity ^ | 6/30/03 | Brendan Nyhan

[goldstategop]

Liberals lie. They have gotten away it for so long they've forgotten what the truth looks like. Brian Nyhan can't refute a single fact Ann Coulter's related, the best he can do is say she didn't get the details right or her interpretations go further than the evidence allows. Nyhan disagrees both with the way she presents her material and with her interpretations. That's reasonable insofar as it goes. But what he never addresses are the facts that Ann lays out throughout her book. Facts deadly to the liberal worldview. When liberals are prepared to deal with them will they finally be able to shut Ann up. They have yet to make the case conservatives have been proven to more wrong than right.

[goldstategop]

That should be Brendan Nyhan.

[StriperSniper]

And wouldnt 'pornographer' be a better term than 'publisher'? makes him sound like simon & schuster.

Is Larry doing Hitlery's next book? ;-)

[StriperSniper]

Memes become useless unless their meaning is transmitted instantly; any fuzz at all about what they mean, and they aren't memes anymore.

She provides ammo that Joe Everyman can take to the water cooler, and she sows doubts in liberal minds that they can use Joe McCarthy as a conversation stopper.

Hopefully her next book will be "Hitler Was A 'Progressive'".

;-)

[Steel Wolf]

I agree with you assessment of her book. Ann does paint with a very wide brush. This, in her own words, is why -

Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.

Whether or not the left has been actively attempting to diminish America's power or done so by gross negligence, the effect is the same. She is caustic as hell, and I think that a %5 reduction in firepower would yield her far greater influence in the long run with a lot more people.

That having been said, I'm halfway through Treason now, and she builds a very strong case. McCarthy's blatant political assassination is well documented, as is the small matter of his being absolutely correct about security risks being employed and promoted by the federal government. Espionage in that period of time did devastating damage to our interests, and McCarthy was pointed in the right direction as far as rooting them out.

That is the ugly truth for conservatives to either accept or deny: Joe McCarthy was right. Coulter does a disservice to conservatives that would like to avoid this subject entirely. She also forces people to take another look at that period of our history, one that now reflects a lot less favorably upon the liberals that Tailgunner Joe.

[Nick Danger]

Hopefully her next book will be "Hitler Was A 'Progressive'".

Ahh yes, the old Hitler meme. There used to be a rule on Usenet that the first guy who user Hitler or the Nazis to smear his opponent was disqualified and ejected from the thread.

Ann Coulter a Nazi? Oh, why not. She's probably a racist, too. All conservatives are, you know. Scratch a conservative, and there's a Nazi underneath; everyone knows that.

I don't think anyone will be rehabilitating Hitler, but flattening the "Reagan meme" would be a useful contribution. He's the guy who tried to sneak ketchup in as a vegetable you know. Starving school children... how low can you go. That's what Republicans are all about... starving children and making war. Only when a Democrat like Clinton got in was salsa finally declared a vegetable. Children need salsa. See, Democrats are for the children.

If Coulter and others can arrange things so the only meme the liberals have left is Hitler, that will be a good thing. Especially since the only serious anti-Semitism we see these days is emanating from the left. That and the fact that the word "Nazi" was a contraction for "National Socialist."

[Jumper]

Ex-Generals spend their formative years in a closed society and are often veryliberal when they re-enter society. Most officers are political creatures who spend their careers walking the fine line of duty, honor, courntry against those nasty words "commander's intent". In essence, officers become what they think their boss expects - and for eight of the last ten years that boss was Clinton and guys of the same bankrupt morality.

[BlazingArizona]

The more I read of Coulter the more I think she is becoming a liability to Conservatives. She is our version of Al Franken, mildly entertaining at first, but the more you read, the more you realize she doesn't know what she is talking about.

There's a difference though: Al Franken is lying.

[WOSG]

One of the liberals' big icons has been Joe McCarthy. There has always been a sizeable number of people running around saying, "Psst... McCarthy was right," but for 90% of the culture, the term "Joe McCarthy" has come to mean "Mysterious bad guy in the 1950's who persecuted people." So Joe McCarthy has become a handy cudgel that liberals use to silence anything they don't like. "You sound like Joe McCarthy, that's just more McCarthyism." He's a meme.

This is right. There have been Liberal 'working assumptions' that have helped shut up Conservatives ... certain subjects or viewpoints are just so 'taboo' that we dont win the argument we just get labelled kooks for daring to even speak. This effective shaming technique limits the debate to the terms the Liberals' want.

One of the 'taboos' was and is calling people traitors when they advocate policies dangerous to our national security. the "joe McCarthy" myth (the myth of his dangerousness) has been fed by liberals in order to make patriotism a taboo 'litmus test'. Very convenient for them as they sell our national sovereignty down a river. We've had out share of out and out enemies to America's interests - Ramsey, Clark, Ron Dellums, etc. but we've had to treat them with rhetoric kid gloves.

Coulter is dynamiting this particular taboo, speaking truth to conventional Liberal PC "wisdom". As with any such exercise in creative destruction, strong language is needed.

One of the liberals' big icons has been Joe McCarthy. There has always been a sizeable number of people running around saying, "Psst... McCarthy was right," but for 90% of the culture, the term "Joe McCarthy" has come to mean "Mysterious bad guy in the 1950's who persecuted people." So Joe McCarthy has become a handy cudgel that liberals use to silence anything they don't like. "You sound like Joe McCarthy, that's just more McCarthyism." He's a meme.

Exactly. Fight bad ideas with better ideas. Fight their memes with ours, ie, with the truth.

[Nick Danger]

Fight their memes with ours

"Clinton" will one day be a meme. It's too soon, people remember too many details about him. As he fades into the past, Clinton will be remembered for only two things: "I did not have sex," and "the meaning of is." His meme will mean something like "guy who lies by finely parsing words."

[Jimmy Valentine]

I am almost finished with the book. Yikes! I'm glad that she will never have cause to take after me!

Who do you suppose is the poor fish that has to open her mail?

Regards,