DAILY NOTEBOOK....
TAKE NO PRISONERS: THE ANTI-LEFTLIB CRUSADE OF ANN COULTER
-- Please Ann, say it ain't so, about Joe!....
July 8 2003: Wow talk about hot! Ann Coulter is sizzling. She's got herself another best-seller on the NY Times best-seller list ("Treason"). She's got thousands of enthusiastic conservative young men panting with lust every time she pops up on Fox, CNN, MSNBC or Good Morning America to flail the leftist establishment, flaunting her long blonde locks, her ever-present plunging neckline and her very tart tongue. And she's got liberal pundits steaming, as she takes after hypocritical liberals, Hollywood peaceniks and Democrats with a witty vengeance.
"Take no prisoners" seems to be the watchword of Ms. Coulter's war on the left. And whether it's Katie Couric or Chris Matthews, Ann usually leaves her interrogators spluttering with outrage and incredulity. In fact, while promoting her new book, nasty Ann even cattily told Diane Sawyer that Hillary Clinton would have an unfair three-to-one weight advantage over Ann in any dustup between the two. She made it clear there's a reason that dowdy Hillary sticks to pants suits, versus the slinky Ms. Coulter who prefers the miniest of mini skirts as her usual dress mode.
Of course, viewing Hillary in a Coulter-style mini skirt might be enough to put male voters off sex for several years -- it's bad enough that Americans have been subjected to the unflattering sight of Mrs. Clinton's thick ankles for almost a decade. So perhaps Diane Sawyer was judicious in quickly changing the subject.
However, if Ann Coulter, the sexy conservative Queen of Mean, has one achilles heel, it's her propensity for overstated hyperbole. Over the top doesn't aptly describe some of Ann Coulter's statements about politics and history. After all, it takes a certain inclination to the outrageous to transform America's most notorious psycho senator and D.C. drunk, Joe -- "there's a Commie in every American cupboard " -- McCarthy, into an American folk hero -- never mind implying that such stalwart anti-Communist Democrats such as John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman were the equivalent of wussy fellow travellers of America's commie traitors.
Now before we go any further, let's get one thing straight. In this case, one can indeed praise the message (from Senator Joe) -- that the liberal Democratic establishment of the 1930's and 1940's allowed itself to be naively infiltrated by communist (Soviet) sympathizers, many of whom were spying for the tyrannical and murderous regime of Joseph Stalin, or accepting financial support from the same repressive dictatorship. But surely if one wishes to remain loyal to the historical record, it's still appropriate to want to metaphorically shoot the messenger bearing that message, Senator Joe McCarthy -- a sociopathic Washington ruffian who wished nothing more than to gain further political advantage and power by terrorizing the innocent as well as the guilty through his Commiet-baiting crusade.
Talk about making it up as you go along. Even though his basic message actually merited attention, Tailgunner Joe sullied it with so many lies and exaggerations that today he would qualify for a job as a New York Times correspondent. Certainly, by the time of his downfall, Senator Joseph MacCarthy had become the Jayson Blair of American anti-communism, demeaning his message with a litany of falsified fantasy and fiction.
Of course, as is her custom, Ann Coulter has something very important to say in her new book "Treason," and in her many promotional outings on its behalf -- left-liberals have spent a half century using the bogeyman of "McCarthyism" to discourage criticism of, and distract attention from, the many sins of the left in America over the years. And granted, Ms. Coulter justifiably makes a number of important points about the follies of the American left during the Cold War, and the merits of the anti-communist crusade in America (especially in the light of recent confirmatory evidence about leftist American treachery unearthed from the archives of the Soviet Comintern and from the decrypted Venona files of the F.B.I.).
But geeez! Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, an America hero?
C'mon Ann. Tell us that maybe that's a wee bit of an exaggeration...that perhaps you got carried away in making your point about the merit of the McCarthy message. But surely you don't really mean it about the man being a hero!
Please Ann. Say it ain't so, about Joe!The Iconoclast
