Posted on 07/05/2003 4:28:35 PM PDT by Pokey78
Few would dispute that she’s a babe. Lanky, skinny, with long blonde hair tumbling down to her breasts, Ann Coulter has been photographed in a shiny black latex dress. She’s whip-sharp in public debates, has done a fair amount of homework and has made a lot of the right enemies.
If much of modern American conservatism has made headway because of its media savvy, compelling personalities and shameless provocation, then Coulter deserves some pride of place in its vanguard.
But that, of course, is also the problem. In the ever-competitive marketplace of political ideas — in a world of blogs and talk radio and cable news — it is increasingly hard to stand out. Coulter’s answer to that dilemma is twofold: look amazing and ratchet up the rhetoric against the left until it has the subtlety and nuance of a car alarm. The left, in turn, has learnt the lesson, which is why the attack dog Michael Moore has done so well.
In fact, it’s worth thinking of Coulter as a kind of inverse Moore: whereas he’s ugly and ill-kempt, she’s glamorous and impeccably turned out. (Her web page, anncoulter.org, has a gallery of sexy images.) But what they have in common is more significant: a hysterical hatred of their political opponents and an ability to say anything to advance their causes (and extremely lucrative careers).
Coulter’s modus operandi is rhetorical extremity. She was fired from the conservative National Review magazine when, in the wake of 9/11, she urged the invasion of all Muslim nations and the forcible conversion of their citizens to Christianity.
As Brendan Nyhan, the media critic, has documented, her flights of fancy go back a long way. No punches are pulled. Ted Kennedy is an “adulterous drunk”. President Clinton had “crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree”. You get the idea.
In Coulter’s world there are two types of people: conservatives and liberals. These are not groups of people with competing ideas. They are the repositories of good and evil. There are no distinctions among conservatives or among liberals. To admit the complexity of political discourse would immediately require Coulter to think, explain, argue. But why bother when you can earn millions by being insulting? Here are a few comments about “liberals” that Coulter has deployed over the years: “Liberals are fanatical liars.” Liberals are “devoted to class warfare, ethnic hatred and intolerance”. Liberals “hate democracy because democracy requires persuasion and compromise rather than brute political force”.
Some of this is obvious hyperbole designed for a partisan audience. Some of it could be explained as good, dirty fun. It was this formula that gained her enormous sales for her last book, Slander, which detailed, in sometimes hilarious prose, the liberal bias in much of the American media.
Her latest tome ups the ante even further. If biased liberal editors are busy slandering conservatives, liberals more generally are dedicated to the subversion of their own country. They are guilty of — yes — treason.
A few nuggets: “As a rule of thumb, Democrats opposed anything opposed by their cherished Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did not like the idea of a militarily strong America. Neither did the Democrats!” Earlier in the same vein: “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.”
And then: “The myth of ‘McCarthyism’ is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren’t hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy’s name.”
Coulter does not seek to complicate her view of liberals with any serious treatment of the many Democrats and liberals who were ferociously anti-communist. Scoop Jackson? Harry Truman? John F Kennedy? Lyndon Vietnam Johnson? She doesn’t substantively deal with those Democrats today — from Senator Joe Lieberman to The New Republic magazine — who were anti-Saddam before many Republicans were.
She is absolutely right to insist that many on the left are in denial about the complicity of some Americans in Soviet evil, the guilt of true traitors such as Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs, who helped Stalin and his heirs in their murderous pursuits.
Part of the frustration of reading Coulter is that her basic causes are the right ones: the American media truly is biased to the left; some liberals and Democrats were bona fide traitors during the cold war; many on the far left today are essentially anti-American and hope for the defeat of their country in foreign wars.
But by making huge and sweeping generalisations about all liberals, Coulter undermines her own arguments and comes close to making them meaningless. If you condemn good and bad liberals alike, how can you be trusted to make any moral distinctions of any kind? And by defending the tactics of McCarthy, she actually plays directly into the hands of the left.
What she won’t concede is that it is possible to be clear-headed about the role that some liberals and Democrats played in supporting the Soviet Union, while reviling the kind of tactics that McCarthy used.
In fact, when liberals taunt conservatives with being McCarthyites, conservatives now have to concede that some of their allies, namely Coulter, obviously are McCarthyites — and proud of it.
Ron Radosh, one of the most reputable scholars who has studied the McCarthy era in great detail, is appalled at the damage Coulter has done to the work he and many others have painstakingly done over the years.
“I am furious and upset about her book,” he told me last week. “I am reading it — she uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc, to distort what we actually say and to make ludicrous and historically incorrect arguments.
“You might recall my lengthy and negative review in The New Republic a few years ago of (Arthur) Herman’s book on McCarthy; well, she is 10 times worse than Herman. At least he tried to use bona fide historical methods of research and argument.”
Radosh has endured ostracism and abuse for insisting that many of McCarthy’s victims were indeed communist spies or agents. But he draws the line at Coulter’s crude and inflammatory defence of McCarthy: “I think it is important that those who are considered critics of left/liberalism don’t stop using our critical faculties when self-proclaimed conservatives start producing crap.”
Amen. American politics has been badly damaged by the scruple-free tactics of those like Moore and Coulter. In some ways, of course, these shameless hucksters of ideological hate deserve each other. But America surely deserves better.
The stakes here must have been high for Sullivan to go to so much trouble. He has dropped considerably in my eyes after this.
But Ann is going back to the 40's and 50's to make her case. Reagan was a Dem in the 50's. Kirkpatrick was a Dem until Reagan ran for President in 80.
You said what I was thinking! On television her snap one-liners can be very effective, but I don't really go for her writing very much.
And my husband just noticed all the pictures on the screen, and said she wasn't much to his taste, but he probably has an ulterior motive.
Your husband has good taste :)
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How does throwing out military ballots fit in with Lieberman advocating a strong national defense?
If you really think Ann does anything but preach to the converted you're delusional. No one but firebreathing right wingers are going to even bother to listen to her arguments. The vast middle that you want to persuade is totally turned off by her attitude and crude behavior.
I have to disagree with you on that. Sullivan is a whiny self promoter who is constantly trying to find a way to distinguish himself from the "conservative" mainstream and thus draw attention to himself. He did this obviously on the sodomy issue, in which he has a vested interest, but also on other issues. The PC-monger smear of Trent Lott over Strom Thurmond is a classic example where Sullivan not only called for Lott's ouster (but then again, everybody wanted him to go because he was incompetant as a leader) but fully endorsed the race hustler attacks as reason to do so. His participation in that charade makes even the worst tactics of Coulter look moderate, professional, and sensible.
In those few cases where Sullivan does actually inject the tools of reason into his arguments (and IMHO they are few and far between), he has tendency to quickly lose it by injecting his own rabid homosexuality into whatever given issue it may be, no matter how far fetched his case is, and from it launch another attack in his personal attention-grabbing crusade.
We as conservatives can, and have, done better. Sullivan and Noonan, National Review and Weekly Standard. All good standard-bearers, that are not throwing around insults half the time.
Noonan is fine. Weekly Standard, though too liberal for me at times, is also respectable. National Review, however, is a sad shell of what it used to be and better resembles Rich Lowry's college frat house than a professional magazine of intelligent writers. Once again, I would have to choose Coulter, despite her flaws, over NR if for no other reason than that the worst of her tactics look professional to Jonah Goldberg writing about "mega wedgies" and telling the intellectual equivalent of fart jokes.
Whether she states it directly or merely skates close to saying it, that is what the nuckledraggers who read her trash take out of her book. Look at any Ann Coulter thread and you will see TLBSHOW and others agreeing that ALL DEMOCRATS ARE TRAITORS.
Duh? The objective is not to flumox the liberal she is debating, it's to persuade the audience. Acting like a pig, whether Coulter or Moore is not going to win friends and influence viewers.
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