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”?
For those interested in the charge, Freda Utley published an article in the American Mercury nearly fifty years ago dealing with this attempt to link the Senator with Nazis which may be found at http://www.fredautley.com/malmedy.htm.
Read it and then decide if Rabinowitz' snide little aside was warranted.
Huh? Have you read this entire thread? Horowitz and Rabinowitz both attacked Coulter with faulty information, with rhetoric which could have come from Joe Conason. In fact, Dorothy and David are now being cited by liberals as "expert" in their criticism of Ann.
I don't find fault with her book. That is why I don't reproach her for it. You find something wrong?
Nice to hear! Doesn't take much research however. All one needs is a copy of Treason and the articles by Horowitz and Rabinowitz.
Flag me when you do the interview, OK?
Because she's a leggy, attractive blonde. As someone else said one on of these threads, if Ann Coulter looked like Dorothy Rabinowitz, many of the same people defending Ann would be on the attack against her.
What do you want to reproach her for? I don't think even Ann would contend she's "above reproach." It's just that she and her supporters have the McCarthyite temerity to demand some substance to the "reproaches." See, when you "reproach" someone without facts, or---God forbid---with a lie, that's called a "smear." And smears are not nice.
Dickstein was engaging in the "McCarthyism" Rabinowitz abhors over a decade before Joe McCarthy held his hearings. On February 11, 1941, Dickstein took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and declared:
"One hundred and ten fascist organizations in the United States have had, and have now the key to the back door of the Un-American Activities Committee!"The ironic part is that Dickstein, on orders from Stalin, introduced the bill creating HCUA. It originally went after conservatives. Dickstein was infuriated when the committee turned on communists.
Why no press coverage about the Mccormick/Dickstein "witchhunt"? The two of them accused conservatives of plotting a "putsch" to take over the Federal government. Dickstein served 11 terms in Congress, then became a judge on the New York State Supreme Court. There is a plaza named after him in NYC. When he wasn't relying on his usual $1,250 a month salary from the Soviets (over $15,000 in current dollars), he was earning extra money by selling Stalin visas for his NKVD agents (Dickstein chaired an immigration committee).
If someone wants to attack Congressmen for playing outseide the rules, there are far better people than McCarthy to attack.
Because she's a leggy, attractive blonde. As someone else said one on of these threads, if Ann Coulter looked like Dorothy Rabinowitz, many of the same people defending Ann would be on the attack against her.
Oh yeah? What about Natalie Maines, Jessica Lange, all the leggy Hollywood blondes that have such nice civil things to say on politics? Why aren't all us horny conservative men defending them too?
But thanks for recognizing that Ann is attractive. However, I'm sure she's hurt that you can't appreciate her for her mind, too...
Has anyone ever mentioned that you debate like a liberal?
There is tons on research on this thread rebutting Rabinowitz and Horowitz point by point. Logical analysis of what they said.
You go to motive. Typical liberal tactic. Ignore the research and facts, go to emotional appeals to what you want others to think our real motives are.
Next you will say we are critizing Horowitz because we want to write a book.
Btw...I happen to think Rabinowitz has a very sexy voice.
Gee, thanks. Y'know, I DID check it out. The person who maintains the site can't distinguish between a "fact" and an opinion. Example:
SLANDER. Journalists are, on the whole, biased to the left. FACT. To help prove this, she says that Rush Limbaugh and his right-wing ilk don't count because they are commentators, not journalists, but does quote liberal commentators such as Maureen Dowd to demonstrate journalists' bias.
Oh, man, Ann, yer busted...
NOT!!!
Calling Natalie Maines or Jessica Lange "leggy" is like saying that Danny DeVito is "leggy." It's just not accurate. And saying that they are "attractive" wouldn't be accurate either. Maines is overweight, and Lange hasn't aged well. But thanks for playing.
But thanks for recognizing that Ann is attractive. However, I'm sure she's hurt that you can't appreciate her for her mind, too...
Um, I'm a heterosexual woman, so I'm not motivated by hormones, unlike many of the guys defending Coulter's every word. And sorry, I can't take anyone seriously who says that Timothy McVeigh's only mistake was not bombing the New York Times building. If Michael Moore had said that McVeigh's only mistake was not bombing the New York Post building, the same freepers who salivate over Ann would be calling for his head on a silver platter.
BS. I argued FACTS with you on another thread -- to wit, that Coulter distorted what Whittaker Chambers said about Joe McCarthy. Instead of conceding those facts, you told me that I should write a book on Chambers. It seems you are the one arguing like a liberal, my friend. And for somebody who's been posting for a grand total of two months, you strut around like you're Ann's bodyguard or something.
Oh, gosh, looks like I'm going to have a hard time finding a hot, leggy liberal blonde out there that a heterosexual woman like you can certify.
Your point's a dumb catty one anyway: none of us defends Ann because he wants to go to bed with her. But I DO get the feeling certain people attack her because she's a "leggy attractive blonde," y'know?
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