Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Andrew Sullivan: It’s all getting a little hysterical (Ann Coulter = Michael Moore)
The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 07/06/03 | Andrew Sullivan

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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: andrewsullivanlist; anncoulterlist
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120 ... 281-291 next last
To: 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.

Obviously, she's a babe. But I didn't know she was hot enough to perk up Sullivan. Gotta be some super pheremones at work here.

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.

Yeah, that's probably a bit over the line. But we were all pretty pizzed.

“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”.

That's what I've observed.

I wish I were educated enough on McCarthy to evaluate her book. But I'm afraid everything I know about the man is what the libs have spread.





81 posted on 07/05/2003 5:40:57 PM PDT by gitmo (Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
I hate to say this, but in a way, he's right. But who cares.. this is America in the year 2003.
82 posted on 07/05/2003 5:42:04 PM PDT by Hildy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
He compares Ann Coulter to Michael Moore!

Ann footnotes every claim she makes.

Michael Moore can't spell footnote, let alone know why they are important.

Besides, Moore is a fat slob and Ann is pretty and sleek.

83 posted on 07/05/2003 5:42:39 PM PDT by HardStarboard (Dump Wesley Clark......maybe Clinton will follow)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: JoeSchem
HERE is the full text of Ann's article - published on 9-12-01, from www.anncoulter.org:

This Is War

September 12 , 2001

BARBARA OLSON kept her cool. In the hysteria and terror of hijackers herding passengers to the rear of the plane, she retrieved her cell phone and called her husband, Ted, the solicitor general of the United States. She informed him that he had better call the FBI — the plane had been hijacked. According to reports, Barbara was still on the phone with Ted when her plane plunged in a fiery explosion directly into the Pentagon.

Barbara risked having her neck slit to warn the country of a terrorist attack. She was a patriot to the very end.

This is not to engage in the media's typical hallucinatory overstatement about anyone who is the victim of a horrible tragedy. The furtive cell phone call was an act of incredible daring and panache. If it were not, we'd be hearing reports of a hundred more cell phone calls. (Even people who swear to hate cell phones carry them for commercial air travel.)

The last time I saw Barbara in person was about three weeks ago. She generously praised one of my recent columns and told me I had really found my niche. Ted, she said, had taken to reading my columns aloud to her over breakfast.

I mention that to say three things about Barbara. First, she was really nice. A lot of people on TV seem nice, but aren't. (And some who don't seem nice, are.) But Barbara was always her charming, graceful, ebullient self. "Nice" is an amazingly rare quality among writers. In the opinion business, bitter, jealous hatred is the norm. Barbara had reason to be secure.

Second, it was actually easy to imagine Ted reading political columns aloud to Barbara at the breakfast table. Theirs was a relationship that could only be cheaply imitated by Bill and Hillary — the latter being a subject of Barbara's appropriately biting bestseller, Hell to Pay. Hillary claimed preposterously in the Talk magazine interview that she discussed policy with Bill while cutting his grapefruit in the morning. Ted and Barbara really did talk politics — and really did have breakfast together.

It's "Ted and Barbara" just like it's Fred and Ginger, and George and Gracie. They were so perfect together, so obvious, that their friends were as happy they were on their wedding day. This is more than the death of a great person and patriotic American. It's a human amputation

Third, since Barbara's compliment, I've been writing my columns for Ted and Barbara. I'm always writing to someone in my head. Now I don't know who to write to. Ted-and-Barbara were a good muse.

Apart from hearing that this beautiful light has been extinguished from the world, only one other news flash broke beyond the numbingly omnipresent horror of the entire day. That evening, CNN reported that bombs were dropping in Afghanistan — and then updated the report to say they weren't our bombs.

They should have been ours. I want them to be ours.

This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson.

We don't need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. We don't need an "international coalition." We don't need a study on "terrorism." We certainly didn't need a congressional resolution condemning the attack this week.

The nation has been invaded by a fanatical, murderous cult. And we welcome them. We are so good and so pure we would never engage in discriminatory racial or "religious" profiling.

People who want our country destroyed live here, work for our airlines, and are submitted to the exact same airport shakedown as a lumberman from Idaho. This would be like having the Wehrmacht immigrate to America and work for our airlines during World War II. Except the Wehrmacht was not so bloodthirsty.

"All of our lives" don't need to change, as they keep prattling on TV. Every single time there is a terrorist attack — or a plane crashes because of pilot error — Americans allow their rights to be contracted for no purpose whatsoever.

The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about whether passengers "packed their own bags," and the hostile, lumpen mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)

Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.


84 posted on 07/05/2003 5:43:48 PM PDT by RonDog
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 76 | View Replies]

To: dogbyte12
ALL DEMOCRATS ARE EVIL
85 posted on 07/05/2003 5:44:45 PM PDT by TLBSHOW (The Gift is to See the Truth)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 79 | View Replies]

To: squidly
"liberal" and "Democrat" as synonymous terms. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aint.

Well said, there are still places here in NC that Democrats are more conservative than their Republican counterparts. Also there are still some places that Republicans don't even run for office, up in the mountains mainly. It's not because they aren't conservative up there, it's just you don't register as Republican in certain counties

86 posted on 07/05/2003 5:47:27 PM PDT by billbears (Deo Vindice)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
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

Flights of fancy are fantasy. Where is the fantasy with Kennedy being an adulterous drunk? Where is the fantasy about Clinton (actually Hillary Clinton - per Gary Aldrich) having had crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree?

So what's Sullivan's point again ?
87 posted on 07/05/2003 5:48:01 PM PDT by stylin19a (is it vietnam yet ?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
If you condemn good and bad liberals alike, how can you be trusted to make any moral distinctions of any kind?

The problem with that statement is that while some liberals are genuinely well intentioned, they all do harm to our nation, and that does have to be addressed.

88 posted on 07/05/2003 5:49:45 PM PDT by alnick (Kakkate Koi!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kozak
BLOATED MURDERING
ADULTEROUS DRUNK.


89 posted on 07/05/2003 5:54:25 PM PDT by PhilDragoo (Hitlery: das Butch von Buchenvald)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: Dave S
The Democrat party members that you mention in this post were a part of a political party that no longer exists.

Anyone who would willingly be a member of that Party which has been hijacked by radicals long ago (last quarter century or so) should indeed be considered either a traitor or a fool
90 posted on 07/05/2003 5:55:01 PM PDT by Radix
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 71 | View Replies]

To: dogbyte12
That is my point I guess. Coulter goes for the zingers instinctually and it can become a battle of name calling. Those who want no change win in that battle. If people remember first that you called Kennedy an adulterous drunk, and remember no more, you have lost. If they know first that Kennedy is screwing up our educational system and trying to fiddle with health care, you win in the long run.

Well, I actually don't have a problem with Kennedy being described as an adulterous drunk, it's just that it's already been done years before by PJ O'Rourke in a fashion that is actually well written and hilariously funny, unlike Coulter.

91 posted on 07/05/2003 5:56:51 PM PDT by John H K
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: PhilDragoo

92 posted on 07/05/2003 5:57:41 PM PDT by ChadGore (Kakkate Koi!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 89 | View Replies]

To: ATOMIC_PUNK


93 posted on 07/05/2003 5:58:03 PM PDT by MeekOneGOP (Bu-bye Dixie Chimps! / Coming Soon !: Freeper site on Comcast. Found the URL. Gotta fix it now.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 45 | View Replies]

To: yall







94 posted on 07/05/2003 5:59:00 PM PDT by MeekOneGOP (Bu-bye Dixie Chimps! / Coming Soon !: Freeper site on Comcast. Found the URL. Gotta fix it now.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 93 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Ann went very easy on Ted Kennedy.
95 posted on 07/05/2003 5:59:32 PM PDT by Consort
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: conservatism_IS_compassion
Bump to self.
96 posted on 07/05/2003 6:00:50 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
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.

National Rewiew is just a PC rag, which is why they fired her.

97 posted on 07/05/2003 6:01:28 PM PDT by Dec31,1999
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Having just completed "Treason" I would suggest it is one of the most important books since "The Road To Serfdom". Sullivan misses the whole point about Coulter's exposing the McCarthy myth. Most of what liberals attribute to him was the result of the HUAC hearings and had nothing to do with his Senate investigation of Communists in sensitive jobs in the government which was his committee's responsibility. The Venona cables revealed that, if anything, he was undereporting the numbers and impact. He was demonized for not revealing names out of compassion for the reputations of the accused not because he didn't know them. The last chapter summarizes what I've felt for a long time. Liberals hate America because they hate civilization. In their minds they are gods who should be able to impose their divine will on the ignorant masses. It is a basic psychological impulse in the immature human that most outgrow in early childhood. They can't accept the constraints of the true Creator and His design and think they can do a fairer job.
98 posted on 07/05/2003 6:04:36 PM PDT by Dave Wright
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: John Lenin


Exposing liberals to the truth is like showing the Vampire a cross, they melt.
99 posted on 07/05/2003 6:05:15 PM PDT by once upon a time
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies]

To: GOPcapitalist
Oh, I won't argue that. I'm no fan of Jonah's writing.
100 posted on 07/05/2003 6:05:57 PM PDT by Endeavor
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 80 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120 ... 281-291 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson