Posted on 07/11/2003 9:35:43 AM PDT by DPB101
David Horowitz has published a long critique of Ann Coulter’s blockbuster Treason. While David goes to great pains to express admiration for Ann’s work, he also makes it clear that he believes parts of Treason are wrong. The heart of his concern is that the Democrat Party is indicted as a co-conspirator in Treason.
Horowitz believes that Democrats are not recognized in Treason for the role that they played in thwarting communism, and he points out a number of important facts which someone who only read Treason would not know.
Democrat Senator “Scoop” Jackson of Washington State was as an implacable a foe of Soviet imperialism. Democrat Jeanne Kirkpatrick was an eloquent defender of American resistance to totalitarianism. Ronald Reagan was a Democrat until 1963.
That list is not exhaustive. George Meany, longtime boss of the AFL-CIO, was a steadfast enemy of Soviet machinations. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a principled liberal Democrat from New York, is responsible for Ann Coulter having the very Venona decrypts essential to exposing the depths of Soviet penetration of America.
Does this mean that the Coulter has reached a false conclusion about the role of the Democrat Party in the communist subversion of America? No. Treason does not necessarily mean ideological treason of sort now proven conclusively by Venona. Bill Clinton’s draft-dodging was because he was pragmatic treason. This sort of pragmatic treason infested the Democrat Party.
Scoop Jackson was a liberal from a swing state whose career was clean as a whistle and who could appeal to anti-communists. He stood a good chance of winning the presidency, if Democrats would have ever nominated him. Scoop ran for the nomination, but he never had a chance. His anti-communism - and only is anti-communism - doomed him from the beginning.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick was a Democrat, but her most famous speech echoes the language at the beginning of Treason which bothers Horowitz. What were those resonating refrains from Kirkpatrick’s 1984 speech to the Republican Convention? “But they always blame America first.” What was the context of her remarks? Reelect a Republican president.
Which Republican president? The one who began his political activities as an anti-communist in Hollywood, and who came to realize that principled anti-communism was welcome only in the Republican Party, which he joined in 1963. Joe McCarthy also began as a Democrat and then became a Republican. Anti-communists never leave the Republican Party to become Democrats, but often have abandoned the Democrat Party or, like Kirkpatrick, become apostate Democrats.
Horowitz correctly points out that the New Left in 1968 opposed Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey opposed communism and supported the Vietnam War. But this overstates the seriousness of the anti-communism of LBJ and Hubert Humphrey. It also presumes a symmetry between the two political parties which simply did not exist.
The two national party conventions in 1968 approached the Vietnam War from dramatically different positions. Humphrey - Vice President and heir apparent, the party’s leading champion of civil rights, darling of the AFL-CIO, and universally recognized as a good and decent man - faced a passionate and ferocious attack for his anti-communism.
The New Left did not attack racial bigots within the Democrat Party like J. William Fullbright or Albert Gore Sr. These illiberal Democrats were anti-anti-communists who opposed the Vietnam War. That alone made them heroes, just as Humphrey’s support for the war alone made him a villain.
Richard Nixon began his political career as an anti-communist, but many delegates at the Republican Convention in 1968 worried that he was not anti-communist enough. When Barry Goldwater, the most passionate and radical anti-communist modern in American politics, stepped before the Republican Convention, the delegates burst into thunderous applause.
Ronald Reagan, who would win the Cold War, had only held elective office for only two years. He had only been a Republican three years. But Republican delegates seriously considered nominating him as the logical successor to Barry Goldwater.
The New Left did not even bother to show up at the Republican Convention. While the SDS and its crypto-Marxist siblings carried great clout among Democrats, these pro-communist groups had no support at all among Republicans.
The pragmatic treason of Democrats is well illustrated by LBJ during the 1968 presidential campaign. While America fought a totalitarian communist enemy, President Johnson announced, a few days before the November election, that he was unilaterally suspending bombing operations against North Vietnam.
The motivation was simple: swing the increasingly close election to Hubert Humphrey by creating an the impression that peace was at hand. Who paid the price for that political pragmatism? America and the South Vietnamese, who were deprived of critically important air power.
Was 1968 the pivotal year in how Democrats approached communism? No. Although David is correct that much of the communists infestation of the federal government was rooted out by the time Truman left office, Truman did not begin in earnest until 1947. Truman had been president for two years - why did the housecleaning begin in 1947? Republicans in 1946 won Congress in a huge landslide. Truman pragmatically decided that anti-anti-communism was a political liability.
But Truman continued to defend people later shown to be communists and to attack anti-communists. Truman, as Ann notes, opposed Churchill giving his famous Iron Curtain speech in Missouri. Truman famously sacked MacArthur for trying to win the Korean War, rather than simply produce a stalemate.
Eisenhower directed his Attorney General to go n television and announce that President Truman had promoted to the leadership of the International Monetary Fund an individual known to be a communist. Why? Eisenhower was hardly a rabid anti-communist, but he also understood that Harry Truman had taken the easy course regarding communism in America.
And, of course, the problem of communism in America did not go away simply because the greatest actual traitors - Hiss, White, and the rest - left the most sensitive posts in the federal government.
The Soviet Union funneled funds into the anti-war movement in America. Communists and communist sympathizers within Hollywood and academia continued to warp American opinions and policies. Would the SDS, Ramparts and the other entities so reflexively supportive of communism have been able to bedevil Hubert Humphrey in 1968 without support from communists in America and without help from Moscow?
If Democrats were not particularly keen on anti-communism before 1968, their attitude after 1968 was profoundly anti-anti-communist. George McGovern favored unilateral disarmament. Jimmy Carter did not discover that the Soviet Union was bad until the last year or his presidency. Clinton, visited Moscow during the Vietnam War and stating his loathing for the military during that war against communism.
Perhaps the clearest indiction of how Democrats have felt about communism is the tepid, almost annoyed, attitude Democrats take toward President Reagan’s bloodless victory in the Cold War. This is in sharp contrast to how Republicans have acted under Democrat presidents when America faced enemies. Republicans supported FDR in the Second World War, JFK in the Cuban Missile Crisis and - unlike his fellow Democrats - Republicans supported LBJ in the Vietnam War.
The single real example of Democrats being tough on communism was John Kennedy. It is revealing that Chris Matthews asked three times if Ann Coulter felt JFK was a traitor. She denies that he was, then adds that his heart was in the right place, but that is not enough for Matthews. It is not his repetitive questions that seem to trouble David; it is her answers.
JFK was strongly anti-communist and he did resist Soviet aggression. The critique that Ann Coulter makes has less to do with JFK’s intentions than with his general incompetence at achieving those goals and with his essentially immoral and dishonest personal life.
Senator McCarthy was presumably censured for bad behavior, when that was clearly not the reason. What is the best evidence of Democrat hypocrisy on the real reasons for destroying McCarthy? John Kennedy - faithless husband, drug addict, pal of crime bosses, vote stealer...and the list seems to grow each year - was made a martyr, when he was actually simply a victim.
McCarthy was an actual martyr, denied even the dignity of a victim. He stood up to the elites of Washington, Hollywood and New York, aware that his enemies were both powerful and unscrupulous. Horowitz notes that McCarthy was right on almost everything. McCarthy certainly acted no worse than several thousand other congressional committee chairmen, except that McCarthy fought a real dragon. Does that not deserve some honor, even posthumously?
The Kennedy Klan looks increasingly less benign as times passes. Bobby Kennedy (aka St. Bobby) grew so hostile to anti-communism that by 1968 he was the principal focus of those very anti-anti-communist efforts intended to keep Hubert Humphrey from winning the Democrat nomination. Ted Kennedy never pretended to be anti-communist, and he formed a core of resistance to Ronald Reagan’s plan to win the Cold War.
Were Democrats all traitors - ideologically or pragmatically - during the long decades of struggle with communism? No, of course not. But was there a profound and fundamental difference in the courage and tenacity that America’s two major political parties displayed in our long battle with the evil empire? Yes, of course there was.
Perhaps the lexicon of the New Left is helpful. During the 1960s, those timid souls who feared the real power of communism called themselves “non-communist” as opposed to “anti-communist”or “communist.” In the war against communism, Republicans leaders were “anti-traitors” and Soviet agents in America were “traitors.” What then were the Democrat leaders? How about calling “non-traitors”?
My goodness, what would that be? Distorting the facts about communist penetration of the Federal government under Democratic administrations? Conceding that people like Hiss, Duggan, White etc. etc. were both trusted government officials and despicable traitors, and that Democrats from FDR to Truman to Kennedy did nothing about these traitors but in spite of contemporaneous evidence of their risk to America's security promoted these cockroaches...BUT that Joe McCarthy was still a "dangerous demagogue"? You mean those "high standards"?
I love Ann's writings,
I know, and you're a good conservative, right?
but she got sloppy with this book, and deserves the critique Horowitz gives her.
Fer SHURRR, just like Joe McCarthy got reckless and sloppy with his "Communist witch-hunting," right?
Horowitz in the long term has done Ms. Coulter, and conservatism, a favor.
Yeah, I just wish I knew what it was, now that he seems to want to undo it by attacking Christian conservatives and Ann.
Frankly your cheap smear against Horowitz is disgusting. How childish to slander and trash the man via extreme innuendo just because he says something you disagree with. He's done a tremendous amount of good work for the conservative cause, and his autobiography 'Radical Son' is an incredibly effective tool for winning liberals over to conservatism. Yeah, he's still liberal on a few social conservative issues, but judge the man on the whole of his contributions to conservatism, not a single-issue.
Frankly I am amazed that there are any conservatives left, given how some are always demanding witch trials at the first hint of a dissenting opinion.
You're right, P. Diddy---I'm guilty of "McCarthyite innuendo." But Dave Horowitz isn't. Do I pass your ideological test now?
You could be right. But it seems to me that part of what drives Ann is the feeling that the Republicans have been very calm about their politics, very factual, and responsible. Republicans want to explain to people what "obstruction of justice" means. Republicans want to discuss the Cosntitution and what is meant by "treason" or "impeachment". Meanwhile, all of that gets lost because James Carville is jumping up and down shouting "SEX! It's all about sex! They is pryin' into our president's sex life!"
The careful approach used by Republicans has frustrated Ann, so she's giving to the Democrats what they usually give to Republicans. This invective-filled approach sticks in the craw of many Republicans (it's just not their style) and it may be that it is counter-productive. But I think it opens the eyes of a lot of people. As you pointed out, Ann includes a lot of truth along with her invective -- that's something the Democrats don't do.
Ann's book is solid on the facts---it's just the "tone" that certain people don't like. Ann's just too talented a satirist for them---makes them embarrassed before their liberal friends at cocktail parties. Besides, everyone knows anyone---let alone a young, good-looking neophyte like Ann---declaring "Joe McCarthy was right!" to the bien pensants in America---both liberal and "conservative"---might as well be standing up in the middle of a Baptist convention and shouting "Cursed be Jesus!"
Rabinowitz is terrific. The only disagreement I've had with her writing is over her review of Ann's book
Rabinowitz claimed there were "many" unknown, little people who were hurt by McCarthyism because they were not resourceful enough to fight back.
She cited one example: Phillip Loeb--an actor on the TV show "The Goldbergs."
Several problems with that. McCarthy had nothing to do with Loeb. He was blacklisted by "Red Channels", a privately funded publication circulated widely which attempted to hold actors and producers accountable for being either members of the CPUSA or supporting communist front groups. This is the exact same thing both conservatives and liberal do today when Doctor Laura or Sean Penn is boycotted. Important to note here that Phillip Loeb refused to tell what he knew of the CPUSA and or apologize for defending Stalin's Show Trials. Not a good move when you have a TV show and American soldiers are being killed by communists in North Korea.
Secondly, Loeb was not a little guy. When he was not invited back for the 1951 season of "The Goldbergs", his union negotiated a $85,000 settlement--over half a million bucks in 2002 dollars. The producer of the show, Berg, explained to Loeb that she had 20 other people who depended on her production for a livihood and she could not sacriface them to his political ideology.
Rabinowitz suggested poverty caused by the inability to land a job due to the blacklist and the cost of caring for his mentally ill son led to Loeb's suicide a few years later. Well, Americans didn't want to see him on their TV sets so that occupation was out. But he did work here and there. And he had enough money to buy several houses from his settlement with Berg.
Loeb killed himself shortly after receiving a tax bill from the State of New York for about $1,000. He had only a few hundred dollars in his bank account.
Loeb refused, when America was at war, to disavow or give helpful information about the system we were fighting. Rabinowitz is dead wrong to claim he was a victim of anyone but himself.
Just as it has been pointed out, Horowitz and others main problem with Ann is that she just isn't polite enough when telling the truth to suit them.
They hint around that her book isn't really that accurate, but then give either incorrect or no examples of error.
The bottom line is that Ann just isn't effete enough to suit them.
To hell with them. They can pontificate their own wisdom until the second coming and no one will notice. Ann, however, relates to people who vote and want the simple story, not meat for coctail party conversation.
Do you know who Horowitz is? Have you read 'Radical Son'? Horowitz is famous BECAUSE he was inside and then outed all the communist insurgents in various front groups. Why would he try and downplay the degree of Commie moles in the govt, when he has spent the second half of his life trying to out them? Who is distorting by innuendo?
Ann is factual, therefore Ann is responsible; if anyone can show me that Ann has not been factual, then I will concede that she has not been "responsible."
As for the point that Republicans have been "very calm" about their politics, I will concede that Republicans have often been very dull and boring in their presentation, which has often made them losers politically, but which has gained them welcome tepid admiration from the people who really count: academics, media people, the New York Times. I take it too many "good Republicans" would rather have Republicans lose nobly than win by making their points in a berserk Coulteresque manner.
For my part, Ann scoring points for conservatism has never lost her any credibility with me, however mad it makes people like Jonah Goldberg, Dave Horowitz, Chris Matthews, Ellis Henican, etc.
Nothing could be farther from the truth...
Horowitz is dazzling with bull sperm instead of speaking the truth simply cogently and to the point, like Ann Coulter does.. I'm not amused... Ann verbally pre-supposes you are intelligent, Horowitz patronizes you with supposed stuff you obviously missed.. garnering brownie points with those Ann Coulter has diced or minced... and adds nothing to the subject..
the boy is still confused from a lifetime of being guilty as charged or worse still is.
Isn't this book subtitled: 'Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism'?
I wonder if Horowitz thinks ALL Republicans are conservative?
I can't tell if you read me the wrong way. Just on the chance that you did: I've read Ann's books. I've read her footnotes. I consider Ann to be very factual and very responsible. I also consider her interesting and fun to read.
I see a lot of Conservatives are also factual and responsible -- but not as interesting or fun. I was attempting to make a distinction based on the "fun" part of the equation, not the "factual" or "responsible" aspects.
Cheers.
The better question is why he would attack Ann's effort to do so in her book "Treason"; why he would make so many easily falsifiable statements about her effort to do so (see top of thread); why he would smear Ann by comparing a term she used in good faith and with solid evidence to communist rhetoric.
Yeah, I know Horowitz, P. Diddy---I have the same general background he does, grew up in the same general set of neighborhoods in the Borough of Queens, NYC, went to the same grungy Ivy League school he did. His article on Ann's book was a smear, a travesty. He's undoing all the "good work" he's done by attacking Christian conservatives and Ann. I'd like to know why the hell he's doing it. Back to Red roots? Pleasing the Malibu set? That's what I mean, you dig?
Didn't mean to misread you. My point is, Ann's been attacked too much (not by you, but by plenty others) essentially for being a "liar." She is not a liar---her opponents are liars. I recognize that her writing and speaking style puts many people off. It turns me on. That's all.
Cheers.
My guess too. Same with Rabinowitz. Tens of thousands of Americans were in the Communist Party from the 1930s until Stalin was exposed as a monster by Khrushchev in his speech to party faithful in 1956.
Those people have kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, relatives and friends who have bought into a myth.
Nobody wants to say to a family member or friend:
"Remember my great uncle Uncle Alger and Aunt Lillian? Remember how we told you they were idealists, humanitarians and victims of a witch hunt? Well, we lied. Uncle Alger and Aunt Lillian supported a regime more murderous than Nazi Germany. They did horrible damage to America. They have the blood of millions on their hands."
...Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing in the Wall Street Journal's editorial section, poured gallons of sarcasm over Treason and Coulter, particularly over her epochal defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but without once mentioning a substantive fault in Coulter's thesis. All Rabinowitz saw fit to cite was the Malmedy Massacre -- an episode near the end of World War II, involving American soldiers taken prisoner in battle and later found dead. A number of German SS troopers were convicted of having murdered the Americans, on the basis of confessions extracted from them by torture. McCarthy protested this as a miscarriage of justice...for which highly principled act Rabinowitz seeks to smear him as a Nazi sympathizer and thus undermine Coulter's case.
Why aren't prestigious conservatives massing behind Coulter? Her style is no more strident than that of our adversaries. More, she manages to be funny, which they do not. Her facts are unassailable. She has yet to be caught lifting something misleadingly out of context. Why not stand with her and say to our opponents, "All right, we've taken the gloves off too. Now we'll see who's standing at the end" -- ?
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