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To: Bob_Dobbs
Coulter is not a master of Swiftian satire. One should not need to ask if something is, or is not, satirical.
Ms. Coulter makes statements which simultaneously sound outrageous--and are plainly true. For example to anyone who takes journalistic objectivity seriously, McCarthy "embarassed the conservative movement" by "creating a climate of fear." To anyone who is willing to believe the evidence of his own eyes, that is patently absurd. I was 10 and 11 years old in 1950, so I lived through "the McCarthy era" as a youth. And it is far more true to say that Democrats conducted a witch hunt in the press for opponents of Communism than the other way around.

It is useful to recall that although the Republicans elected Eisenhower in '52 and '56, and majorities in the House and the Senate in '46 and '52, Democrats otherwise controlled the political branches of government from the election of 1932 through 1967. IOW there was never a time when Democrats suddenly retrieved their courage and began to speak out against "McCarthyism" because there was never a time when Democrats stopped speaking and printing freely. Any self-respecting Freeper has seen plenty of examples of Democrats loudly declaiming things which are patently absurd and self-contradictory. This was the earliest example of which I was aware.

It wasn't McCarthy but his critics who have created a climate of fear of speaking out. Any use of the charge of "McCarthyism" simply illustrates that that campaign has never really stopped.

Apart from the Holy Bible, I don't have a favorite.
That would have been gutless political correctness anytime from the founding through the 1950s--now in takes guts to say that (unless of course you're a Democratic politician, and thus are confident that your friends won't take you seriously).
When something seems to good to be true...
Whether taken as a statement by Ms. Coulter that she is actually Miss Goodie Two Shoes, or as hyperbole illustrating the drastic shift in the moral climate--and there is seperate reason to think it is more the former--I do not find her comment exceptionable.

15 posted on 01/12/2004 6:31:02 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (Belief in your own objectivity is the essence of subjectivity.)
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