Don't Call Ann Coulter the Michael Moore of the Right
by Humberto Fontova
Posted Jun 20, 2006
The dentist cranks up his drill, revs it up and digs in. At first, no problem. The Novocain kicked in minutes ago. Half our head is numb. He asks us a question and we nod spastically. He asks another and we mumble like Steve Martin in “The Jerk” when reading Bernadette Peters’ goodbye note that fell in the bathtub.
Meanwhile his drill keeps buzzing. The buzz gets louder, harsher. Our jaw—and finally our whole head—start vibrating. The sadist in the face mask and rubber gloves drills deeper, deeper. Soon—“AAWH!” We wail in pain. He went too deep. Either that, or not enough Novocain kicked in.
Some say Ann Coulter has the same effect on liberals. She “hits a nerve,” they say. Thus they squeal and shriek every time she releases a book. If only liberals were so lucky. The fact is, when this woman cranks up her drill and goes after a liberal nerve, she makes Lawrence Olivier’s Dr. Szell in Marathon Man come across like Florence Nightingale.
And what fun to watch! “Is it safe?” she asks Alan Colmes with a malicious leer. “Is it safe?” she snickers to Katie Couric while putting on the gloves. “Is it safe?” she inquires of Matt Lauer while revving the dentist’s drill in his face. Compared to Coulter’s liberal victims, Dustin Hoffman while strapped into Dr. Szell’s torture chair, suffered about as much as Sen. Teddy Kennedy at a Club Med massage parlor that serves drinks.
Calling Ann Coulter the “Michael Moore of the right” has become commonplace. But the label insults Coulter more heinously than she insults any liberal, including John Murtha and the Jersey Girls, for which she’s been recently scolded by everyone from Matt Lauer to Bill O’Reilly.
In 2000 Michael Moore wrote a famous letter to Elian Gonzalez. Among the highlights: “your mother decided to kidnap you … in Cuba, you were in jeopardy of receiving free health care whenever you needed it, an excellent education in one of the few countries that has 100% literacy … your mother snatched you and put you on that death boat because she simply wanted to make more money. Your mother placed you in a situation where you were certain to die on the open seas and that is unconscionable. It was the ultimate form of child abuse.”
So let’s see here: in the Jersey Girls we have women who—yes, tragically—became widows, but also became brazen political partisans, media darlings and millionaires. They stepped into the media spotlight and started shooting at conservative targets. Fine. But someone should have notified them that this set them us as targets, too.
On the other we had a destitute single mom who grew up oppressed under a Stalinist system and who either drowned or was eaten alive by sharks attempting to free her son from the clutches of a regime that jailed more of it’s subjects than Hitler or Stalin’s and was busily brainwashing him.
Coulter refers to the media-lavished millionaires as “Harpies” and “Broads.” Moore trashes Elian’s martyred mother as a money-mad gold digger, a kidnapper and a child-murderer.
So naturally the media brand Coulter as the insensitive spewer of hateful invective, as in the New York Daily News’ “Coulter the Cruel.” Moore, on the other hand, according to Frank Rich of New York Times, is merely a “polemicist and powerful storyteller.”
Among many other crimes and horrors, “Florida’s Cubans” writes Moore in his book, “Downsize This,” are responsible for “sleaze and influence-peddling in American politics. … In every incident of national torment that has deflated our country for the past three decades … Cuban exiles are always present and involved.”
Such a blanket trashing of an entire ethnic group straddles the very dictionary definition of bigotry. Normally the entire Democratic Party would work itself into a collective froth against the villain who spouted such “hate-speech.” Normally every media outlet in the land would promptly and boastfully ban this villain from its airwaves, broadcasting the decision between film clips of fire-hoses in Selma, cross burnings, and torch-light Storm Troopers at Nuremberg.
Moore himself denounces Republicans as “people who hate … people who get up at six in the morning trying to figure out which minority group they’re going to screw today.”
But ah! In “Downsize This,” Moore was insulting Cuban-Americans (i.e. Republicans), you see. So all is forgiven. So instead of being pummeled as a bigot by the usual media, academic and governmental sniffers and snouters, Moore was feted as the guest of honor at the last Democratic National Convention, squatting his gargantuan gluteus in the very President’s Box alongside Jimmy Carter. Then waddling onto the stage at Boston’s Fleet Center to an ovation rivaling even the one that deafened Fidel Castro when he addressed Harvard Law School and Washington’s National Press Club in 1959. Though it was close.
“These Cuban exiles, for all their chest-thumping and terrorism, are really just a bunch of wimps. That’s right. Wimps,” Moore continues in his book. His smear refers to all Cubans who left Cuba but singles out the Bay of Pigs invaders for particular scorn. “Ex-Cubans with a yellow stripe down their backs,” he calls them, on top of “crybabies.”
During the Bay of Pigs days these men—all volunteers and overwhelmingly civilian—battled savagely against a Soviet-trained and Soviet-led force 10 times its size, inflicting casualties of 30-to-1. When the local CIA man realized they’d been betrayed by the best and brightest he pleaded with their commander to allow an evacuation. “We will not be EVACUATED!” yelled that commander into his radio from the clearly doomed beachhead. “We came here to FIGHT! This ends HERE!”
And so it did. Then came the real heroics. Living under a daily firing squad sentence for almost two years these men refused to sign the confession damning the “U.S. Imperialists” (the very nation, which for all they knew at the time, that had betrayed them on that beachhead.) Many spat on the document in front of their Communist torturers. “We will die with dignity!” responded their second-in-command Erneido Oliva to his furious Communist captors, again and again and again.
In blanket-trashing all Cubans who for some crazy reason rejected free-health care and universal literacy, Moore also trashes the longest serving political prisoners of the century. Cuban-Americans like Roberto Martin-Perez, Mario Chanes De Armas, Eusebio Penalver, Angel de Fana, who spent 30 years in Fidel Castro’s gulag. That’s more than three times as long a Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn and Natan Sharansky spent in Josef Stalin’s gulag.
“For months I was naked in a 6x4 foot cell,” recalls one prisoner. “That’s four-feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.” Again, escaping their tortures would have been easy: simply sign “confessions.” They refused. Normally such men would have publishers, producers and documentary makers lining up for their stories. A&E would feature them every other month. NPR, “Frontline,” “60 Minutes” and the History Channel would beat down their doors.
Alas, these were Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s victims. Enough said.
In other words, the very things people like Moore, Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks say and write for free publicity, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s prisoners refused to sign to save their lives, or to end two decades of daily torture. Yet the Democrats’ pet walrus sneers at them from his Upper West Side pad as “wimps, cowards and crybabies.”
A guilt-stricken JFK finally ransomed back the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Hundreds of these promptly joined the U.S. Army and many volunteered for action in Vietnam. One of these was named Felix Sosa-Camejo.
By the day Mr. Sosa-Camejo died while rescuing a wounded comrade, he’d already been awarded 12 medals, including the Bronze Star, three Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts. I’ll quote from his official citation:
“On February 13, 1968, the lead platoon was hit by an enemy bunker complex manned by approximately forty North Vietnamese Regulars. Upon initial contact the point man was wounded and lay approximately 10 meters in front of the center bunker. The platoon was unable to move forward and extract the wounded man due to the heavy volume of fire being laid down from the enemy bunker complex.
“Captain Sosa-Camejo immediately moved into the firing line and directed the fire against the enemy bunker. With disregard for his safety, Captain Sosa-Camejo ran through the intense enemy fire and pulled the wounded point man to safety. After ensuring that the wounded man was receiving medical treatment, Captain Sosa-Camejo returned to the fire fight and again exposed himself to the intense enemy fire by single handedly assaulting the center bunker with grenades killing the two NVA soldiers manning the bunker. As he turned to assault the next bunker an NVA machine gun opened up and he was mortally wounded. Captain Sosa-Camejo’s valorous action and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.”
From his limousine Michael Moore sneers at this Cuban-American and his Band of Brothers as “wimps and crybabies with yellow lines down their back.”
Maybe I’m biased, but nothing—absolutely nothing—Ann Coulter has said about John Murtha or John Kerry or the Jersey Girls strikes me as remotely comparable in vileness, cowardice and rank stupidity as Michael Moore’s blanket calumny against some of the bravest men of the 20th Century.
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