A Vast Right-Wing Cry of Treason

A Vast Right-Wing Cry of Treason
In her new book, Ann Coulter gets McCarthy right—and makes conservatives mad.
By Sam Tanenhaus
Posted Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 11:13 AM PT

Ann Coulter, the right wing's dial-900 girl—a rail-thin, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, big-eyed leggy blonde who winkingly serves up X-rated ideological smut on liberals—is at it again. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes—or sneers—in Treason, her follow-up effort to the best-selling Slander. Like its predecessor, Treason sits atop the best-seller charts, riding higher than one of Coulter's signature miniskirts.

But this time around, it isn't the liberals who are up in arms; it's the conservatives. Coulter's slurring of Democrats—from Harry Truman (soft on communism) to Tom Daschle (soft on Iraq) —has set off a howling chorus on the right. David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, among others, have been sternly giving Coulter history lessons, dredging up (once more) the anti-Communist credentials of Cold War liberals like Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.

But this is yet another case where the dumb public is right. Coulter's shocking book is not shocking at all. Nor is it novel. It is merely the latest in a long line of name-calling, right-wing conspiracist tracts, a successor to Elizabeth Dilling's Red Network, Fred C. Schwarz's You Can Trust the Communists (To Be Communists), and—a personal favorite—John A. Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason. This last, which sold 2 million copies in 1964, "explained" how the U.S. military had consciously served "the long-range political advantage of the communist conspiracy" in World War II. You can laugh, but by the time the 25^th-anniversary updated edition was published, it had sold 7 million copies and Stormer was holding weekly Bible meetings for Missouri state legislators.

Coulter's cheerleading on behalf of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and "his brief fiery ride across the landscape," as she puts it, is what has her critics most exercised. Doesn't she understand, they ask, that McCarthy wasn't an anti-Communist at all but a dangerous outrider who harmed a noble cause by defaming and giving ammunition to the left? Again they're right—but only on rather drearily familiar grounds. Coulter is closer to the truth on the big question, McCarthy's actual place in the conservative pantheon. For many years he was precisely the GOP folk hero she says—a pivotal figure who invented the inside-the-Beltway insurgency that has been the party's staple for half a century now, currently embodied by flame-throwers like Tom DeLay.

During McCarthy's peak years, he was a GOP heavyweight egged on by the likes of Senate leaders Robert Taft and William Knowland. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, the GOP presidential nominee, shared a platform with McCarthy even though McCarthy had smeared Ike's mentor, George Marshall, by calling him a Communist dupe. And as Coulter says, the people—a lot of them, anyway—loved him, too. More than 1 million signed a petition supporting him during the censure debate of 1954, and half the Republican senators (22 out of 44) voted against the measure. A year after McCarthy's death in 1957 Robert Welch, another conspiracy-monger, founded the John Birch Society to pick up the cudgel and continue the "fight for America." Today, Birchers are remembered as kooks (and were often dismissed as such at the time). But these "little old ladies in sneakers" got a big hug from the conservative movement. Ronald Reagan for one—though mistily depicted of late as the ideological heir of the Democratic "traitors" Truman and JFK—made his political debut stumping for Congressman John Rousselot, a top California Bircher, in 1962.

And the McCarthy legacy lives on. Remember the attack ad used in the last election against Georgia Democrat Max Cleland—the one that spliced in videotape of Osama and Saddam? The McCarthyites used the same ruse to destroy Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings in 1950, only then it was a composite picture juxtaposing photos of Tydings and Earl Browder, the onetime leader of the American Communist Party.

Of course, using dirty tricks isn't news in politics—and their use is not limited to the right. Nor, for that matter, is the cry of treason. Woodrow Wilson dusted off the Sedition Act in order to jail critics of World War I. Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the indictments of more than two dozen isolationists in 1942 on the sham charge that they were Nazi agents. A judge threw the case out, but conservatives didn't forget.

All Coulter has done is import this approach—the flat-out accusatory style of hardball politics—into the realm of serious political discourse, ignoring the preferred arts of indirection and innuendo. And that's why her critics are agitated. It all comes down to tact—or tactics. It's OK to denounce a semi-fictional construct: a "Fifth Column" that opposes the Iraq War or "the axis of appeasement" or liberals who "hate" America and wish it ill. Or to imply, as William Safire did this week, that unnamed journalists pressing the WMD case are, "by their investigative and oppositionist nature," unwitting handmaidens of Saddam.

But the indelicate Coulter has crossed the line, stating openly the message others push subliminally. Consider her notorious comment, following 9/11, that the solution to radical Islamists was for the United States to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." This met with an outcry that was, again, loudest from the right. Within days, National Review online dropped her column. (And Horowitz, to his credit, picked it up for FrontPage.) But no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to point out that her formulation was prescient—right up to the eerie moment in April when Ari Fleischer was dodging questions about the evangelicals camped on the Iraqi border, poised to Christianize the Muslim infidels.

Ann Coulter may have committed "treason" against conservative good taste. But she's done the rest of us a favor. She has exposed the often empty semantic difference between the "responsible" right and its supposed "fringe."

Was this one posted?

Pots and kettles Ann Coulter July 24, 2003 |

The Howard Dean campaign was forced to cancel events this week in response to events in Iraq. Donations to the Odai and Qusai Hussein Memorial Fund can be submitted directly to the Dean campaign.

Dean responded to the passing of these martyrs to American jingoism by angrily announcing that the ends don't justify the means. This is a war we're talking about. Why don't the ends justify the means? (Note to the Democrats: Just because you defended Bill Clinton doesn't mean you have to defend every government official who is reliably reported to be a rapist.)

But as Baghdad erupted in celebrations after receiving the news that Heckle and Jeckle were dead, liberals were still hopping mad that last January, President Bush uttered the indisputably true fact that British intelligence believed Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from Africa.

That was, and still is, believed by British intelligence. It also was, and still is, believed by our own National Intelligence Estimate service. The CIA, however, discounts this piece of intelligence. The CIA did such a bang-up job predicting 9-11, the Democrats have decided to put all their faith in it. They believe the nation must not act until absolutely every agency and every last American is convinced we are about to be nuked. (Would that they had such strict standards for worrying about nuclear power plants at home.)

The Democrats already explained their extremely exacting standard for responding to potential nuclear threats back before we went to war with Iraq – and Bill Clinton successfully ignored the threat of a nuclear-capable North Korea. But most of the Democrats who are bellyaching now didn't have the courage to vote their so-called "consciences" in Congress last October. Now that we've won, they have managed to produce fresh indignation about a war they only briefly pretended to support.

After years of defending Clinton, liberals love the piquant irony of calling Bush a liar. For 50 years liberals have called Republicans idiots, fascists, anti-Semites, racists, crooks, shredders of the Constitution and masterminds of Salvadoran death squads. Only recently have they added the epithet "liar." Even noted ethicist Al Franken has switched from calling conservatives "fat" to calling them "liars."

This is virgin territory for Democrats – they never before viewed lying as a negative. Their last president was called "an unusually good liar" by a sitting Democratic senator. Their last vice president couldn't say "pass the salt" without claiming to have invented salt. Having only just discovered the intriguing new concept of being offended by lies, the Democrats are having a jolly old time calling Bush a liar. But they can't quite grasp the concept of a lie as connoting something that is – at a minimum – untrue.

Sharing a chummy laugh about Republicans on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, NBC's Tim Russert asked Joe Biden what the Republicans would have done if a Democratic president had uttered 16 mistaken words about national security in a State of the Union speech. Sen. Biden said: "This is going to be counterintuitive for Biden to show his Irish instinct to restrain myself, you know the answer, I know the answer, the whole world knows the answer. They would have ripped his skin off."

At least Bush put it in his own words – if you know what I mean. Perhaps Biden is annoyed that Bush merely cited the head of the British Labor Party rather than plagiarizing him.

Back to Russert's challenge, I shall dispense with Clinton's most renowned lies. (Every Democrat commits adultery and lies about it. Fine, they've convinced me.) Clinton also lied every time he said "God bless America," though he doesn't believe in God or America, and I don't recall any Republican ever ripping his skin off about that.

But how about a lie in a major national speech slandering your own country? In Clinton's acceptance speech at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, he said:

We still have too many Americans who give into their fears of those who are different from them. Not so long ago, swastikas were painted on the doors of some African-American members of our Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Folks, for those of you who don't know what they do, the Special Forces are just what the name says; they are special forces. If I walk off this stage tonight and call them on the telephone and tell them to go halfway around the world and risk their lives for you and be there by tomorrow at noon, they will do it. They do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors.

Clinton was referring to an alleged act of racism in which the prime suspect had already been determined to be one of the victims himself – a black soldier known for filing repeated complaints of racism. The case had been under intense investigation and the fact that the leading suspect was black had been widely reported in the news. But a Democratic president dramatically cited a phony hate crime in order to prove that his own country is racist. (And he used a lot more than 16 words to do it.)

Democrats didn't mind a president using cooked evidence in order to defame his own country. They reserve their outrage for a president who defames the name of an honorable statesman like Saddam Hussein by suggesting he was seeking uranium from Africa on the flimsy evidence of the findings of British intelligence, the findings of our own NIE, the fact that Israel blew up Saddam's last nuclear reactor in 1981, and that we learned about Saddam's reconstitution of his nuke program only in 1996, when his son-in-law briefly defected to Jordan. (The Mr. Magoos from the U.N. Weapons Inspection Team had missed this fact while scouring the country for five years after Gulf War I.)

Apparently the ends do justify the means, but only if the end is to slander America – the country we're supposed to believe liberals love every bit as much as the next guy.

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org, a TownHall.com member group.

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