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.
I wholeheartedly agree. And one very significant difference is that the left approach it from the perspective that if you tell the same lie often enough, people accept it as the truth. At least Ann and Michael are telling the truth. Maybe if it is repeated as often as the leftist rhetoric, eventually people will hear it.
Of course you are right. But the confusion of terms leads occasionally to some strange arguments, so whenever possible, I prefer to use another word. More confusing is the use of the term "conservative", when its meaning in the US is quite different from its meaning elsewhere.
And even more confusing yet is the whole left-right model, with fascists on the right, marxists on the left, and us supposedly teetering in the middle on a slippery slope leading left or right; conservatives being supposedly closer to the right, and therefore closer to fascism than our "liberal" friends, who are supposedly further left and therefore further away from fascism.
Left-right may be a useful way of distinguishing left-fascism from right-fascism, but to refer to American conservatism as if it was "rightist" and somewhere on the fascist/marxist continuum is erroneous. We are not part of that continuum, we are something entirely "else". We are the blood enemies of that entire continuum.
But, of course, its not always possible to explain all that in a short conversation, so for most purposes, if forced to use "liberal" and "conservative" in the way it is commonly used, of course I do.
Your adversaries have only pointed out that you have no basis for anything -- other than "x says she made a mistake". Sullivan says she made mistakes. Sullivan says Radosh says she made mistakes. and John H K says she made mistakes. But .........
not one mistake is cited. I wonder why.
Yeah, I agree that Sullivan is disappointing whenever the topic touches on his boyfriend-hood. [he was raging this past week against scalia] I think you are right to sense that, surface to the contrary, this article of his on Ann, smacks of "the boyfriend". I was having that thought going on in the back of my head and then I saw that you nailed it ... and you brought it to expression.
Yeah, I agree that Sullivan is disappointing whenever the topic touches on his boyfriend-hood. [he was raging this past week against scalia] I think you are right to sense that, surface to the contrary, this article of his on Ann, smacks of "the boyfriend". I was having that thought going on in the back of my head and then I saw that you nailed it ... and you brought it to expression.
Another example is "Ideas Have Consequences" by Richard Weaver.
Compare any of these works with the scrabble-thinking in the typical marxist-feminst inspired attempt at revision of what people used to know, but no longer learn.
So what is the objection with Coulter's book? Frankly, I do not yet know because noone -including Sullivan--feels the need to cite a specific thing that she got wrong. I do not see her shouting out others on TV; she is usually shouted down by the lefty types who just interrupt and never ever respond to what is said [and really meant]. They always try to make debating points on turns of phrase or other minutiae.
She keeps saying that the McCarthy of history is largely a myth by the left - wing press. I do know that when Welch was attacking Shine on McCarthy's staff as a way to get at Cohn's homosexuality and some minor favoritism, McCarthy went after some facts about a junior staff member in Welch's law firm. That piece has beeen played ad nauseum in my youth with out the explanation one learns only on one's own. So, wasn't it McCarthy who was vilified? & wasn't McCarthy right in his charges. Isn't Ann's point that the CIA was reading the cables and knew that there were all this infiltration in the government. Wasn't the Army and the State Dept a site for Red spies?
Why didn't the Democratic party suffer for this? Wasn't part of the reason the villification of McCarthy, which was done in order to shift the onus from the left?
It seems that Ann Coulter is correct and the left is at its same old game of villifying the ones who speak this truth.
I tend to agree with you. She also lumps the Liberals and LEFTISTS together. IMO there's a vast distinction. However, it's a matter of semantics.
Someone please define:
a Democrat
a Liberal
a Leftist???
I tend to agree with you. She also lumps the Liberals and LEFTISTS together. IMO there's a vast distinction. However, it's a matter of semantics.
Someone please define:
a Democrat
a Liberal
a Leftist???
In 1954, critic Leslie Fieldler captured the essence of "McCarthyism":"From one end of the country to another rings the cry, 'I am cowed! I am afraid to speak out!', and the even louder response, 'Look, he is cowed! He is afraid to speak out!'"The only actual example which comes to mind of an American journalist admitting to having actually been cowed is
It puts me in mind of the comedian Herb Shriner, who I loved to hear on black-and-white TV. The one story of his that sticks with me is how
My sister met a man once in the lobby of a hotel and he handed her a note saying,The message denies itself. The more contemporaneous claims of being "cowed" were published, the more plain it is that those actually "cowed into silence" were--no one at all.'You are the only woman I have ever loved.She wasn't sure it was sincere, though--it was mimeographed!
Please come to me in room 103.'
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