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.
That pretty well sums up Ann Coulter, IMO.
Coulter is not responsible for the fact that some people will mischaracterize what she writes.
Senatorial Privilege, Leo Damore, Regnery Gateway, 1988, page 7.
Ann states that the corpus of writing about McCarthy is almost completely fact-free--that it is all either written by McCarthy's enemies or sourced only to things that were written by his enemies.I was a child/young teenager in the "McCarthy era." I don't claim to have been fully up to speed; I was just becoming aware of politics. But here is what has the ring of truth to me: the idea that there was ever a time in my late childhood when non-soviet-agent liberals were actually cowering in fear and silence is absurd. Look at the Hollywood types who lashed out at the congressional committees investigating Communist influence! They got sympathetic coverage in spades!
The way to penetrate the veil of lies is, IMHO, to ask each media company then extant if they were cowed by McCarthy. Each individual one of them would proudly claim, and be well able to prove, that they "courageously" stood in opposition to McCarthy. And yet the claim is that there was a "McCarthy rein of terror" turning the nation's liberals into a quaking persecuted minority. A cursory glance at the statistics for Democrat and Republican registered voters would prove that to be ridiculous. As would the relative strength of the parties in Congress--approximate parity, leading after 1954 to a run of 40 years of Democrat domination of the House of Represenatives.
Ann quotes somebody, and I can't find the quote, to the effect that
Someone cries out in a loud voice, "I am being cowed by McCarthy!"It simply makes no sense. As Ann put it, the worst that happened to you, if your parents were traitors, was about what happens to a College Republican at a liberal arts college today.And the hue and cry of papers and broadcasters across the land rises up, "He is being cowed!"
I'm afraid Ann is a little rough on that theory. She says that Truman has the same anticommunist bona fides before the 1946 Republican takeover of Congress as Bill Clinton had welfare-reform bona fides before the 1994 one. Namely, none at all.She says that Truman and Dean Acheson snubbed Churchill after his "Iron Curtain" speech, and offered Stalin the opportunity to give a rebuttal speech in America--and a ride on the USS Missouri to get here . . .
I agree with you. I find it offensive to continue using the word "liberal" as it is commonly used, as the modern left is the very opposite of liberal. The correct term would be socialist, or leftist as you suggest, I even accept their usage of "progressive" although that too is a misnomer. I have begun to use the term "populist" as an alternative.
But I do everything I can to avoid using the word "liberal" in reference to these people. In my other post in this thread, I felt forced to use the word because Coulter does; even at that I felt obliged to place it in "quotes".
................ Ms. COULTER: Well, point one--point one and point two, by the end of the week, had become official government policy. As for converting them to Christianity, I--I think it might be a good idea to get them on some sort of hobby other than slaughtering infidels., perhaps that's the Peace Corps, perhaps it's working for Planned Parenthood, but I've never seen the transforming effect of anything like Christianity....
RonDog...Great reply. Thanks for taking the trouble to find and paste these quotes.
No, I don't beleive that was "over the top"; see RonDog's reply 59 on this thread. BTW, that is one of my favorite Ann Coulter pictures!
That may be a little harsh on Harry, especially since he wasn't in the Roosevelt Admin all that long. I suppose we should be thankful though that he was picked in 1944 instead of Henry Wallace again. Just think of it. Roosevelt dies, Wallace becomes president, and every communist thug in the third world has an open friend, ally, and supporter of his revolution sitting in the US White House. They had it almost that good under Roosevelt, but Wallace would have been open about it.
Are they standing up for our enemies or for us? That is the litmus test.
There were at one time Soviet agents sprinkled throughout the State Department and the Pentagon, and even in the president's inner circle. If you get a paycheck and directives from Stalin, you are arguably a traitor. The Democratic leadership (and the press) did everything imaginable to protect them, to keep them in their positions, and to vilify anyone who moved against them. To this day, these individuals, who have names, and the people who protected them, who also have names, have been celebrated by the Democratic party as heroes.
Anyone who spoke against them has been character-assassinated to the point of caricature. Remember, for most people, all we know about McCarthy is what we have been told by Hollywood, and in our text-books. Just think what our grandchildren would know about Bush if his biography was directed by Sean Penn, or any of today's Hollywood left. They have had the monopoly until now. They wrote the histories, they told the story. So, unless you have a long memory, or you are unusually inquisitive, if you are the average person, everything you know about McCarthy, everything you know about that era is untrue. It takes someone with some grit to speak up publicly and set the record straight. And who ever tries to do it is asking to get creamed in the public forum.
If there is another book coming that is focused directly on McCarthy, which according to Coulter there is, perhaps it is Radosh's, then I for one cannot wait to read it. I have been saying for some time that its high time that we reclaim McCarthy, warts and all. We need to get it all out on the table. We will stipulate his defects, but we will also put the whole seamy story out there, all of it. We will see who stands vindicated and whose role in American history gets seriously re-written.
And, trust me, if you deal factually with what we now know from Venona, and from the opening of the KGB archives, the histories of World War 2, of Yalta, of the fall of China, and of the Korean War must all be re-written.
They want us to use nice, polite language while they roll right over us with high-grade political propaganda.
But this is politics; it's isn't the yacht club. Coulter is doing exactly what should be done.
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