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Oh, that's good. That might make a good sign for our Hillary FReep. Here's another good one, created by PeaceBeWithYou. Says it all.
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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.
Should have been:
And I haven't read anything that this guy Sullivan quotes has written.ML/NJ
The worst thing you can say about Coulter is that she moves the discourse to the right by unabashedly putting a positive face on everyone the left hates. And that is faint praise; what she actually does is honestly but vigorously argue the Reaganite worldview. To paraphrase Goldwater,Extremism is defense of the truth is no vice,and moderation in deconstructing historical smears is no virtue.
Amen! It is time to take off the gloves!
And this is exactly what the Left does. They've managed to use the language so effectively that they control nearly all of the governments of the entire Western world. . .[and] they did it by using emotional appeals that we've all heard literally thousands of times.
IOW, liberals live and die by PR, and use the "Big Lie" technique. They are able to do so because journalists are liberals.That sounds like tinfoil to a lot of people who aren't paying attention. But the best way to understand it is simply that journalists are people who can make money by being bigmouthed, and claiming preternatural knowledge and objectivity is just part of being bigmouthed. Actually being knowledgable and dispassionate are not job requirements, and indeed are qualities seldom found in journalists.
And political "liberalism" is best understood as the consequence of the nature of journalism. The unprincipled approach to getting along in politics is to go along with journalists. That is what Joe McCarthy did not do--and consequently they found it necessary to pull out all stops to destroy his reputation and effectiveness.
For openers, Coulter does her investigative homework and meticulously footnotes. Moore is a blowhard and factually challenged, just like his intellectual twin brother Al Franken.
By the way, what theory says that Teddy Kennedy is not an "adiulterous drunk"?
Regards,
It's high time somebody on the right did, instead of just rolling over or modifying their own positions to placate the insatiable leftists. Seems that Ann is the only one on our side with the guts to really inflict wounds on the enemy.
Which of these statements is untrue?
"If you condemn good and bad liberals alike, how can you be trusted to make any moral distinctions of any kind?"
The problem is that, "good" liberals, if indeed there is such a thing, much like "peaceful" Muslims, are conspicuously silent.
Point well made. In my experience, the majority of them really ARE ignorant of the policies they support and vote democrat because they really believe that the democrats are the party of the people or that they support the working man or that they work to help the poor. The end result, though, is exactly the same as if their intentions were purely evil and they voted democrat to promote that evil. I think that was the point that Ann was making.
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Oh, that's good. That might make a good sign for our Hillary FReep. Here's another good one, created by PeaceBeWithYou. Says it all.
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hehe ! Might catch a few 'RATS in that trap !
One big difference is in accuracy of the charges. If a person is known to deliberately make untrue statements he is a liar. If one takes a stand that aids the enemies of this country, he is by definition, treasonous. These are not slanderous terms or terms tossed about for the purpose of being inflammatory. They are accurate depictions of those who promote the liberal/socialist agenda. The term moron, might be a little over the top, but only for the simple reason that the technical definition of moron doesn't apply, but to say that many are ignorant is absolutely truthful.
Gary Aldrich in his book, Unlimited Access. Here is the whole story:
Well said.
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