Posted on 07/05/2003 4:28:35 PM PDT by Pokey78
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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