Posted on 07/18/2002 4:00:08 AM PDT by Elle Bee
EVEN TAKING INTO account the extraordinary capacity of the left for hallucinatory self-aggrandizement, the insipid blather about the feminists and the total radio silence on Phyllis Schlafly is astonishing.
The elite media cast about for women to praise, hailing any female who has achieved the amazing feat of having passed the bar exam, but treat the stunning accomplishments of Phyllis Schlafly like the publisher of the New York Times treats his SAT scores. (It is a dark secret that must not be revealed.) Schlafly simply cannot be mentioned except for the occasional demeaning caricature.
About the time a young Hillary Rodham was serving as inspiration for the perfect little girl in the Hollywood thriller "The Bad Seed," Schlafly was remaking the Republican Party.
In 1964, Schlafly wrote "A Choice, Not An Echo," widely credited with winning Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination for president. The book sold an astounding 3 million copies. (The average nonfiction book sells 5,000 copies.) Goldwater lost badly in the general election, but the Republican Party would never be the same.
Goldwater's nomination began the retreat of sellout, Northeastern Rockefeller Republicans who hoped to wreck the country with slightly less alacrity than the Democrats. Without Schlafly, without that book, it is very possible that Ronald Reagan would never have been elected president.
As the feminists spent 20 years engaged in a death-match debate over whether it is acceptable for feminists to wear lipstick, Schlafly was writing 10 books, most of them on military policy.
She co-authored "The Gravediggers," accusing the elite foreign-policy establishment of cheerfully selling out the nation's military superiority to the Soviet Union. That book sold 2 million copies. She also co-authored the extremely influential (and extremely long, at more than 800 pages) "Kissinger on the Couch," methodically dissecting Kissinger's foreign policy and attacking his beloved Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.
Meanwhile, the feminists moved on from the weighty lipstick debate to pornography. (As Irving Kristol has suggested, their primary area of agreement was that 18-year-old girls performing sex on stage should be paid the minimum wage.)
An early and vigorous proponent of a missile defense shield, Schlafly has written extensively about ICBMs and missile-defense treaties. Her work was a major factor in President Reagan's decision to proceed with the High Frontier technology.
Having reached agreement on the necessity of a minimum wage for prostitutes (oops "sex workers"), feminists turned their inexplicable wrath on the titles "Mrs." and "Miss."
About the same time, Schlafly noticed that the Equal Rights Amendment was sailing toward ratification without anyone noticing. When Schlafly took up her battle against the ERA, the Senate had passed it by 84 to 8. The House had passed it by 354 to 23. The ERA was written in to both the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. Thirty states had approved it in the first year after it was sent to the states for ratification. Only eight more states were needed.
But the ERA had not yet faced Phyllis Schlafly. Over the next eight years, thanks to Schlafly and her Eagle Forum, only five states ratified it but five other states rescinded their earlier ratifications.
What the feminists lacked in linear thinking, they made up for in viciousness, control of the media and Hollywood glitz. As Schlafly said, feminists had "the movie star money and we have the voters." With an army of women behind her, Schlafly defeated the ERA, beating both political parties, two presidents, the Senate, the House and a slew of Hollywood celebrities.
Soon feminists took up the issue of girl-firemen, demanding to know what possible arguments there were, pray tell, for women not to be firemen. (A short list: their inability to pick up the hose, their tendency to cry and panic when confronted with dangerous situations, the effect on families whose homes are on fire when they open the door and see the female equivalent of Michael Dukakis in a tank.)
Schlafly moved on to ludicrous United Nations treaties, the Violence Against Women Act, sexual harassment law, values-clarification programs and other monstrosities too numerous to catalog. People who dismiss her as a mere demagogue or rabble-rouser either don't read her work or don't have any idea what actual "scholarship" is.
She was nearly the first woman ever to attend Harvard Law School though it did not then admit women, Schlafly's Harvard professors found her so brilliant that they offered to make an exception for her. (She declined.) Instead, she married, raised six amazingly accomplished children and later attended law school in her 50s all while fighting the establishment in her free time. She is brilliant, beautiful, principled, articulate, tireless and, most important, absolutely fearless.
That Phyllis Schlafly is the mortal enemy of a movement that claims to promote women tells you all you need to know about the feminists. That most people know more about Madeleine Albright's brooch collection than Schlafly's achievements tells you all you need to know about the media.
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I strongly suggest you look up the rules governing the internment/relocation camps the US government provide for American citizens of Japanese ancestry. First, they were not locked up there they were free to leave provided they did not enter the exclusionary zone of the West Coast states. Second, the "loss of assets issue is not entirely true due to the madated sale of assetts many lost money in the relocation and due to the inflation resulting from WWII were unable to purchase the same real estate3 they may have owned prior to internment. Real estate and operating businesses were the only true losses and the ownership of those business was compensated although clearly not sufficiently. this was not the Germans rounding up Jews for the death camps although Minetta does make it appear that way.
I am not defending the decision made by Franklin Rosevelt but I am stating that it is only by the American standard that this re-location for the wartime emergency was in any way a greivous wrong but we are in America and it clearly was wrong.
The big problem that both Ms. Coulter and I share with Mr. Minnetta's charcterization of this experience is that he likens it to the Nazi round ups or the Japanese attrocities it was not an attrocity. I note I have an aquaitance whose family is nesie whose family moved to Missouri from one of the camps in late 1942. Her has no problem with the history and his father and mother refused any repoarations. His unlce was a combat vetran his father was 4F but workrd in a defense plant as an engineer. His grand parents who were Japanese citizens were in the camps for the entire time.
In short the issue is not as black and white as sometimes depicted.
Funny you say that.
The words "Ann" or "Coulter" can hardly be mentioned on FR without multiple people posting a half dozen pictures of her. Many people do not question what she says because of her perceived beauty. She's tall and skinny, and many of us men here don't find that too attractive. Its fine if others do, but I propose its not "us" who are obsessed with her. Secondly, she is way off the mark on several issues.
Please, scroll back up. Look at the second picture. She's sitting there in a hoochie-mama skirt, flinging her hair like a flirty 16-year old. That's the epitome of womanhood that all females should admire?
It would be easy to dismiss anything Ann says if you depend on what she looks like to base your opinion on...
It is odd that those who accuse her admirers of focusing only on her looks seem to be willing to dismiss her on the same basis.
I will agree with OPH in one regard though - her looks don't really do that much for me either. But I am definitely in love with her mind.
We NEED someone who is A.) pretty enough to get on TV, unlike, say, Limbaugh, and B.) is willing to say un-PC things like matter-of-factly calling X42 a rapist. We need someone who will express a wacky "invade their countries, kill their leaders & convert them to Christianity" view so that whatever we end up doing isn't the right-most fringe idea anyone's heard.
She's our James Carville.
With that kind of bile, you neatly prove Ann's point for her. The nasty, personal, lying attacks you unload on Ann Coulter invalidate any pretense of objectivity when it comes to a conservative woman such as Ann Coulter.
If Ann Coulter pisses you off to the point where you engage in calling her names and attacking her character she must be doing something right. Truth is, the messenger isn't the problem, her message is. She ridicules liberals, gets on TV a lot and has a #1 best seller exposing liberal media bias against conservatives but your type whine about her skirt lengths and her weight. Yeah, you're a real serious type, I can see. Please. Calling Ann Coulter names doesn't cut it and won't shut her up or diminish her influence one iota, in fact, attacks seeem to strengthen her. She's a well educated woman, a constitutional attorney, as you know, and has as much credibility as anyone on Free Republic.
Keep it up, you look dumber every time you try this 'Ann's a bimbo (or worse)' routine to attack a credible source of conservative thought who gets mainstream attention for conservative values while your type shouts smarmy names at her from the sidelines. It's a losing game and Ann wins most every time.
Maybe you can attack Phyllis Schlafly next. She's getting old, maybe you can attack her age...call her senile, yeah, that's the ticket! Anything to shut up these intelligent, conservative females that just annoy you to death, especially that Coulter woman and her short skirts.
Forget it. They have the national stage and a huge audience, you have FR and your petty personal attacks. They win. Game over.
We NEED someone who is A.) pretty enough to get on TV, unlike, say, Limbaugh, and B.) is willing to say un-PC things like matter-of-factly calling X42 a rapist. We need someone who will express a wacky "invade their countries, kill their leaders & convert them to Christianity" view so that whatever we end up doing isn't the right-most fringe idea anyone's heard.
She's our James Carville.
You got that right! As David Horowitz says, Pubbies will continue to lose until they learn how to throw rocks like the Dems.
You're showing your ignorance. The reference was to the US DOJ's "Honors Program", not to Coulter's graduation with honors. The "Honors Program" is the way new attorneys get entry-level jobs with the Justice Department. It is very competitive.
And being a clerk for a judge generally involves doing a little research, making coffee, and listening to his war stories. Ask yourself how long she worked fo the Justice Department, and what her workload consisted of.
Again, you are betraying your ignorance. Law clerks to federal judges often draft the court's opinions. Like the DOJ Honors program, federal clerkships are highly coveted positions that only the best graduates can obtain.
We NEED a loud-mouthed bomb-thrower like her. Conservatives / GOPers are FAR too nice in the way we confront issues. You have Dems openly (on TV) saying that Bush allowed the 9/11 attacks to help defense contractors, or that he practically killed James Byrd himself. Nothing is too outrageous for them to allege. But what do the Republicans do? We hem and haw and twiddle our thumbs.Right on! (For the first two.)We NEED someone who is A.) pretty enough to get on TV, unlike, say, Limbaugh, and B.) is willing to say un-PC things like matter-of-factly calling X42 a rapist. We need someone who will express a wacky "invade their countries, kill their leaders & convert them to Christianity" view so that whatever we end up doing isn't the right-most fringe idea anyone's heard.
She's our James Carville.
Two out of three ain't bad. :)
See also:
Ann Coulter guest-hosts for Dennis Prager (7/18 - listen online!): LIVE DISCUSSION THREAD
www.AnnCoulter.org/events.html | Ann Coulter
Posted on 07/18/2002 8:19 AM Pacific by RonDog
BTTT
Fine with me. It is still a free country...until you liberal rumpswabs wreck it.
Don't let the door hit you in the bumm as you swish and sashay out!
Phyllis Schlafly was a couple of years ahead of me in law school in the late 1970s, so I didn't get a chance to know her while there. At that time, just about every female law student there was a rabid feminist, and they just hated her. They absolutely loathed and despised her, and they loathed and despised the one professor they considered her ideological "ally." It was quite a spectacle, but I will say Mrs. Schlafly - as you might expect - maintained her dignity while those 30 years her junior exhibited their ignorance.
And yet, her book is the best-selling book in America, and yours isn't. I've read her, and I've read you, and (though you're not bad) she's a better writer than you.
Yeah, it's the skirts.
Schlafly was remaking the Republican Party.
Phyllis, we need you again....
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