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I have come to the conclusion that Dorothy is correct about Ann.

(Flame-retardant suit on.)

I have come to the conclusion that Dorothy is correct about Ann.

Agreed, she's gotten kind of shrill lately. Pity.

No. The writer either skimmed the book to ignore material or else is deliberately leaving material out. I suggest anyone (a) read the book, and then (b) compare it to this article. You will see the article is a hatchet job.

As for my perspective on Ann, I think she swings for the fences and so sometimes strikes out. A lot of what she says is rhetoric, but I also believe she makes her case.

But were there Soviet spies in the State Department?

Of course you are correct. Coulter will succeed in selling a lot of books and in tarring the rest of us conservatives. McCarthy was a loathsome figure. Coulter's sanity is in question.

Historical perspective is the only way to distinguish the truth from the impassioned claims of the ignorant. In 1954 there seemed, for example, to be some excuse for the swirling confusion about the guilt of Alger Hiss and the validity of defenses of the Rosenbergs.
The "fog of war" is simply the fog of current events, made excruciating to commanders by their acute need for information on which to base life-or-death decisions. Decisions which, in retrospect, will often look foolish to those who can't empathize with the commander's ignorance of the enemy's, and sometimes even his own, forces' disposition.
But what is far worse than blundering because contradictory indications confused you in the heat of battle is failure to put the pieces together in the big picture, half a century after the fact. And that is what America is guilty of.
Ann Coulter has written two history books to grind sawdust: Treason and Slander. They document two things--the fact that "liberalism" assaults rather than defending freedom, and the fact that journalism is "liberal." This has been in front of the noses of the public all our lives, and should go without saying. Instead she has to load up her works with invective to make us see the obvious.
And why is that? It is because even conservatives get too involved with current events, looking forward into that fog rather than looking behind us to the clear landmarks of history.
In chapter 3 of Treason, Ann compares the positions of people in the Bush Administration with those of people which the secret (even, nay especially, from Truman!) Venona decrypts demonstrate were in fact Soviet spies.
Alger Hiss (assistant to the secretary of state) can best be compared to Paul Wolfowitz! How would we feel if we knew he was an al Qaeda operative, and Bush didn't care?!
Harry Dexter White was assistant to the secretary of the Treasury. How would we feel if we knew he was an al Qaeda operative, and Bush didn't care?!
Lauchlin Currie matches up with Andrew card. How would we feel if we knew he was an al Qaeda operative, and Bush didn't care?!
Duncan Lee, chief of staff to the head of the OSS, matches up to an assistant to CIA Director Tenent. How would we feel if we knew he was an al Qaeda operative, and Bush didn't care?!
Harry Hopkins matches up with Karl Rove. How would we feel if we knew he was an al Qaeda operative, and Bush didn't care?!

And the list goes on!! If that was the situation in the Bush Administration, does anyone think that effective action would be taken against al Qaeda?? Yet that was the situation in the FDR/Truman Administrations--and yet serious people contend that the important thing to know about the era was that "Joe McCarthy was a zealot who gave his name to the abuse of civil rights".
Yes, McCarthy's name was given that connotation--by his enemies and America's, in a successful red herring operation which drastically weakened the heat they would have deservedly gotten.