COULTER GETS ATTACKED Part 1 - Has she no shame?
Of course not, and now we know why: In her new book "Treason," Ann Coulter reveals that her role model is Joe McCarthy. And her grasp of facts is even worse than her judgment..
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By Joe Conason
July 4, 2003 | "Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'"
So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's bestselling "Slander" is now followed by "Treason," her new catalog of defamation against every liberal and every Democrat -- indeed, every American who has dared to disagree with her or her spirit guide, Joe McCarthy -- as "traitors." And like a criminal who subconsciously wants to be caught, Coulter seems compelled to reveal at last her true role model. (Some of us had figured this out already.)
She not only lionizes the late senator, whose name is synonymous with demagogue, but with a vengeance also adopts his methods and pursues his partisan purposes. She sneers, she smears, she indicts by falsehood and distortion -- and she frankly expresses her desire to destroy any political party or person that resists Republican conservatism (as defined by her).
"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America," according to her demonology. "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." And: "Liberals relentlessly attack their country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are, because that would be 'McCarthyism,' which never existed." (Never existed? Her idol gave his 1952 book that very word as its title.)
Coulter went from cable network sideshow to full-fledged media star last year when her book "Slander," fed by the same ferocious right wing of the country that elevated both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News -- both of which did much to promote Coulter -- became a runaway bestseller. "Treason" displays many of the same mental habits as did "Slander": the obsession with "manly" men, the disparagement of women as weak-willed and whorish, the disturbed attraction to images of violence. "When Republicans ignite the explosive energy of the hardhats, liberals had better run for cover," she barks, obviously longing for the days when construction workers beat up antiwar demonstrators. And there is the same spittle-flecked name-calling, like a Tourette's sufferer without the mordant energy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is "Jackie Kennedy's poodle." The late religious scholar Reinhold Niebuhr was "a big, sonorous bore." Labor leader Walter Reuther was a "sanctimonious fraud." McCarthy? "A poet," she tells us.
If so, Coulter is inspired by the same paranoid muse. She crafts images of liberals "dedicated to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home," seeking "to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and truth." To make such accusations requires a certain kind of mind, to put it politely. Or to put it less politely -- as the managing editor of Commentary remarked in his scathing review of "Slander" -- Coulter "pretends to intellectual seriousness where there is none." But in the marketplace for conservative ideology, her brand of fakery is hot.
The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be. So the rubes who buy "Treason" will believe her when she accuses George Catlett Marshall, the great general who oversaw the reconstruction of Europe, of nurturing a "strange attraction" to "sedition" and of scheming to assist rather than hinder Soviet expansion.
Her duped readers will believe that Marshall and President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin only because Republicans won the midterm elections in 1946. They probably won't know that Truman confronted the Soviets in the Mediterranean with a naval task force several months before Election Day; or that the new Republican majority cut Truman's requested military budget by $500 million as soon as they took over Congress in January 1947, nearly crippling the American occupation of Germany and Japan; or that Truman, Marshall and Dean Acheson had to plead with the isolationist Republican leadership to oppose Russian designs on Greece and Turkey.
Her deceptive style is exemplified in an anecdote she lifts from an actual historian and twists to smear Truman. She writes: "Most breathtakingly, in March 1946, Truman ostentatiously rebuffed Churchill after his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Immediately after Churchill's speech, Truman instructed his Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to attend a reception for Churchill a week later in New York." |
