Andrew Sullivan: It’s all getting a little hysterical (Ann Coulter = Michael Moore)

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.

"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."

Call me delusional. You don't convince most people by holding forth a Socratic dialogue. On the contrary, you convince them by making the other side into the enemy.

Her book is number two on the New York Best Seller List. Who's "turned off" by Ann Coulter? You tell me.

HMMMM....please cite ONE "distorted fact or figure" for us.

Why don't I let a scholar of history answer for me. Directly from the above article:

"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.

Again, I haven't yet heard anyone refute any substantive point she has made. I would say that they can't. For one, I remember the history, and she is right. For another, if they could, they would. They don't.

If you want to convince people, start with bold. Speak up boldly. But you will notice that if you are effective in debating the left, if you are effective at pointing out the inaccuracies and inconsistencies and internal contradictions in their case, they will accuse you of being hateful no matter how nice and even-toned you are. Thats when the venom starts, and you had better be prepared for it.

So, I vote for bold, if it fits your personality. Go with whatever works for you. But expect to be vilified whatever you do.

The objective is not to flumox the liberal she is debating, it's to persuade the audience

One perfectly legitimate viewpoint is that the objective is to get people to buy your book. And the way you would do that is to inspire the people who might buy your book to decide that they are interested in it. And if you flummox the liberal host, that gives your book a buzz among the audience of potential buyers.
You will object that that doesn't persuade "the middle". But in fact it puts the liberal on the defensive when your book outsells Hillary's. And getting the liberals on their heels and the conservatives on their toes is plenty good.
Imagine if every time liberals sneer, "McCarthyism" they are asked to explain exactly what they mean, and given no free passes in that explanation. Clintonite pettifoggery consists of refusing to concede a legitimate point, no matter what "It depends on the meaning of 'is'" absurdity you have to resort to. Coulterite backbone consists of refusing to concede an illegitimate point no matter how much bluster you are subjected to.

Just curious, but where WAS this Clinton Christmas tree story reported? Be nice to have a copy for reference.

Page 105, paragraph 4 of Unlimited Access by ex-WH FBI Agent(and Freeper), Gary Aldrich.

Excerpt

Some of the ornaments were silly and some were dangerous, like the crack pipes hung on a string. We couldn't figure out what crack pipes had to do with Christmas no matter how hard we tried, so we threw them back in the box. Some ornaments were constructed out of various drug paraphenalia, like syringes, heroin spoons, or roach clips, which ar colorful devices sometimes adorned with bird feathers and used to hold marijuana joints.

That's one paragraph of about 8 pages on the Christmas decorations in the clinton WH.

Grab a copy. It's 200 pages of insight into the scum that inhabited the WH for 8 years longer than they should have.

That may be a little harsh on Harry, especially since he wasn't in the Roosevelt Admin all that long.

Roosevelt was limited to 20 hours of work a week for a long time during WWII, and was death warmed over during the '44 campaign (and the Democrats lied like a rug about it; they had to run FDR because they would have lost the presidency with anyone else heading the ticket).
FDR died pretty soon after the '45 inauguration; Truman essentially had two years to decide something was more important that going along with "Uncle Joe."

I suppose we should be thankful though that he was picked in 1944 instead of Henry Wallace again.

There was a tremendous fight over that issue before/during the '44 DNC convention; Texas was dead set on replacing Wallace. But as Ann points out, FDR could have died before Wallace was replaced.

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.

. . . a point which Ann makes in the book.

But I agree with Andrew that she's a bit extreme when it comes to her attacks on the liberal left....It's one of the things I like about her...but it is extreme.

Rush Limbaugh notes that if he let it happen, callers would make his program "All media bias, all the time."
What's "extreme" is the extent to which the terms of the national debate are set by propagandists known as "objective" journalists. If you clear your head of all naivite about "journalistic ethics" and just assume that people who run printing presses do what comes naturally you can begin to grasp the enormity of the confidence racket to which American politics have been subject.
The Internet is "the poor man's soap box". Production costs on the Internet are dirt cheap compared to any other medium. Next comes radio, talk radio is cheap to produce. At the opposite end of the spectrum you have the movies, which cost gazillions. The higher the production cost, the more domination by elites.

Sullivan is definately using the left's usual tactic of calling names instead of dealing with fact. He equates Ann with that liar Moore and that is where HE becomes unbelievable and a lying liberal. He namecalls Moore (rightly so) and Ann (shows his bias)--"shameless hucksters of ideological hate". First of all, Ann hates all communists and rightly so. People who try to undermine this country causes thousands of deaths to US citizens which Ann clearly backs with fact. I point out to Sullivan--there are EVIL people in the world, something that liberals are unwilling to acknowledge. In fact, for some reason, and thoroughly documented by Ann, they are in BED with the EVIL people. I saw her book as rational logic at its best! Sullivan has his own nihilistic reasons for wanting Ann discredited and should be honest about WHY he is criticizing her. Yes, she makes outrageous statements but that is because they are ABOUT outrageous deeds and lies done by Democrats and whitewashed by the press!!!! The statements can be nothing but outrageous unless you try to twist them like the left does. I have found NO current democrats who are knowledgeable about politics who are decent people--if they are knowledgeable and are Demoncrats-- they are evil; but usually they are idiots and trust what some dope like Hitlery says or trusts Moore's and the left-wing media propaganda mill. I will admit that not all are "evil" but if they are not, they are dumb or not interested in politics at all-- thinking it doesn't matter.....which is also stupid. My experience with Democrats has been the same as Ann's and I, myself, was once a "stupid, trusting" Democrat.

My prolem with this analysis is that the left has long since abandoned the sort of nuanced, repectful dialog that Sullivan claims to be searching for. It uses hysterical ridicule as its normal mode of communication. Now a hot babe comes along who can give hysterical ridicule as good as she gets, and the left can't abide it. Perhaps if they had been willing to concede that maybe - just maybe - George Bush is a human being who is making tough decisions in a war we did not choose to fight, we wouldn't need to use our "Coulter bomb" against them.

Treason page 11:

There were, admittedly, a few rare and striking exceptions to the left's overall obtuseness to Communist totalitarianism. The Democratic Party was certainly more patriotic then than is has become. Throughout the sixties, the Democrats could still produce the occasional Scoop Jackson Democrat. John F. Kennedy's pronouncements on Communism could have been spoken by Joe McCarthy. For all his flaws, Harry Truman was a completely different breed from today's Democrats: He unquestionable loved his country. Through the yers, there were various epiphanic moments creating yet more anti-Communist Democrats. The Hitler-Stalin Pact, Hiss's prothonotary warbler, Stalin's show trials, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago--all these had their effect.
But after World War II, the Democrats party suffered from the sort of pusillanimous psychosis that seized all of France after World War I...Beginning in the fifties, there was a real fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. By the late sixties the contest was over. The anti-communist Democrats had lost...

I bought "Treason" on a day I had duty and read the whole thing that night. I couldn't put it down. I have thought for a long time that the left was pretty much anti-American. I just did not think they are as blatant about it as they really are. It is nice to see it all documented. I gave it to my kid to read. I am reading witness by Whittaker Chambers now.

“Ron Radosh ...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.

This is a curious statement. Radosh is refered to exactly three times in Ann's book and she provides footnoted quotes of the sources that she uses in two cases and simply refers to the book that he wrote about the Rosenbergs in the third.

Call me delusional. You don't convince most people by holding forth a Socratic dialogue. On the contrary, you convince them by making the other side into the enemy.

You've got to get them to listen to you and your arguments before you can move them to HATE the opposition. Hate doesnt come that easy to most non-political types.

Her book is number two on the New York Best Seller List. Who's "turned off" by Ann Coulter? You tell me.

So Hillary's book was there for a couple of weeks. I'm not going to get too excited one way or the other. Conservatives are notoriously voracious readers of political books and unlike the Dems they have the $$$ to buy them.

You would be shocked at the percentage of Americans that read much less buy one or more books per year. It is a very small percentage of the population. Saw it recently. Believe it was LESS THAN ten percent.

But you will notice that if you are effective in debating the left

Why are you wasting your time debating the left. All that will do is make you feel good. The people that need to be persuaded are those in the middle. You are not going to convince the lefties. To them its a religion just like it is to you.

You will object that that doesn't persuade "the middle". But in fact it puts the liberal on the defensive when your book outsells Hillary's. And getting the liberals on their heels and the conservatives on their toes is plenty good.

Most of the people that need convincing arent watching the political shows and they dont read. They are certainly not going to buy a political book although some of the weirder guys might gawk at the cover of her book. I think you put too much emphasis on getting the liberals on their heels because no one is going to notice.

>> "That may be a little harsh on Harry"

What about this quote from her book:
"To review the record, as part of Truman's yeoman work on the Cold War, he cooperated with the Soviets at the Nuremberg Trials, whitewashed their joint aggression with Hitler under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He looked the other way when the Soviet Union murdered three million Russian prisoners of war returned home by the Allies. On his watch, the Soviet army consolidated its control over nine countries, China became a Communist dictatorship, and tens of millions of people were murdered under Communist tyrannies. Truman defended Communist spy Alger Hiss as a patriot who was framed by Republicans ... He refused to remove members of his administration identified to him by J. Edgar Hoover and others as Communist agents, inluding Harry Dexter White."

Sounds like Harry was a real anticommunist. Yeah sure.

For the most part, I enjoy Ann Coulter very much and I'm glad she's on our side - but she could tone down the hyperbole once in a while. That column she wrote comparing security lines at airports with the Bataan Death March was truly ridiculous, and the comparison was actually offensive (to me, and others if the threads here were any kind of gauge).

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