CoulterKampf The Problem With Ann Few would dispute that she's a babe. Lanky, skinny, with long blonde hair tumbling down to her breasts, Ann Coulter has been photographed in a shiny black latex dress. She's whip-sharp in public debates, has done a fair amount of homework, and has made a lot of the right enemies. If much of modern American conservatism has made headway because of its media savvy, compelling personalities, and shameless provocation, then Coulter deserves some pride of place in its vanguard. But that, of course, is also the problem. In the ever-competitive marketplace of political ideas - in a world of blogs and talk radio and cable news - it's increasingly hard to stand out. Coulter's answer to that dilemma is two-fold: look amazing and ratchet up the rhetoric against the left until it has the subtlety and nuance of a car alarm. The left, in turn, has learned the lesson, which is why the fraud and dissembler, Michael Moore, has done so well. In fact, it's worth thinking of Coulter as a kind of inverse Moore: where's he's ugly and ill-kempt, she's glamorous and impeccably turned out. (Her web-page, AnnCoulter.org, has a gallery of sexy images.) But what they have in common is more significant: an hysterical hatred of their political opponents and an ability to say anything to advance their causes (and extremely lucrative careers). Coulter's modus operandi is rhetorical extremity. She was fired from the conservative National Review magazine when, in the wake of 9/11, she urged the invasion of all Muslim nations and the forcible conversion of their citizens to Christianity. As media critic, Brendan Nyhan, has documented, her flights of fancy go back a long long way. No punches are pulled. Ted Kennedy is an "adulterous drunk." President Clinton had "crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree." You get the idea. In Coulter's world, there are two types of people: conservatives and liberals. These aren't groups of people with competing ideas. They are the repositories of good and evil. There are no distinctions among conservatives or among liberals. To admit the complexity of political discourse would immediately require Coulter to think, explain, argue. But why bother when you can earn millions insulting? Here are a few comments about "liberals" that Coulter has deployed over the years: "Liberals are fanatical liars." Liberals are "devoted to class warfare, ethnic hatred and intolerance." Liberals "hate democracy because democracy requires persuasion and compromise rather than brute political force." Some of this is obvious hyperbole, designed for a partisan audience. Some of it could be explained as good, dirty fun. It was this formula that gained her enormous sales for her last book, "Slander," which detailed in sometimes hilarious prose, the liberal bias in much of American media. But her latest tome ups the ante even further. If biased liberal editors are busy slandering conservatives, liberals more generally are dedicated to the subversion of their own country. They are guilty of - yes - treason. A few nuggets: "As a rule of thumb, Democrats opposed anything opposed by their cherished Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did not like the idea of a militarily strong America. Neither did the Democrats!" Earlier in the same vein: "Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant." And then: "The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name." Coulter does not seek to complicate her view of liberals with any serious or lengthy treatment of the many Democrats and liberals who were ferociously anti-Communist. Scoop Jackson? Harry Truman? John F Kennedy? Lyndon Vietnam Johnson? She doesn't substantively deal with those Democrats today - from Senator Joe Lieberman to the New Republic magazine - who were anti-Saddam before many Republicans were. She is absolutely right to insist that many on the Left are in denial about some Americans' complicity in Soviet evil, the guilt of true traitors like Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs, who helped Stalin and his heirs in their murderous pursuits. And part of the frustration of reading Coulter is that her basic causes are the right ones: the American media truly is biased to the left; some liberals and Democrats were bona fide traitors during the Cold War; many on the far left today are essentially anti-American and hope for the defeat of their country in foreign wars. But by making huge and sweeping generalizations about all liberals, Coulter undermines her own arguments and comes close to making them meaningless. If you condemn good and bad liberals alike, how can you be trusted to make any moral distinctions of any kind? And by defending the tactics of Joe McCarthy, she actually plays directly into the hands of the left. What she won't concede is that it is possible to be clear-headed about the role that some liberals and Democrats played in supporting the Soviet Union, while reviling the kind of tactics McCarthy used. In fact, when liberals taunt conservatives with being McCarthyites, conservatives now have to concede that some of their allies, namely Coulter, obviously are McCarthyites - and proud of it. One of the most reputable scholars who has studied the McCarthy era in great detail, Ron Radosh, is appalled at the damage Coulter has done to the work he and many others have painstakingly done over the years. "I am furious and upset about her book," he told me last week. "I am reading it - she uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc. to distort what we actually say and to make ludicrous and historically incorrect arguments. You might recall my lengthy and negative review in The New Republic a few years ago of Herman's book on McCarthy; well, she is ten times worse than Herman. At least he tried to use bona fide historical methods of research and argument." Now Radosh has endured ostracism and abuse for insisting that many of McCarthy's victims were indeed Communist spies or agents. But he draws the line at Coulter's crude and inflammatory defense of McCarthy. "I think it is important that those who are considered critics of left/liberalism don't stop using our critical faculties when self-proclaimed conservatives start producing crap." Amen. American politics has been badly damaged by the scruple-free tactics of those like Michael Moore and Ann Coulter. In some ways, of course, these shameless hucksters of ideological hate deserve each other. But America surely deserves better.
George F. Will: Proof of WMDs is crucial By George F. Will Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, June 22, 2003 WASHINGTON -- An antidote for grand imperial ambitions is a taste of imperial success. Swift victory in Iraq may have whetted the appetite of some Americans for further military exercises in regime change, but more than seven weeks after the president said, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," combat operations, minor but lethal, continue. And overshadowing the military achievement is the failure -- so far -- to find, or explain the absence of, weapons of mass destruction that were the necessary and sufficient justification for pre-emptive war. The doctrine of pre-emption -- the core of the president's foreign policy -- is in jeopardy. To govern is to choose, almost always on the basis of very imperfect information. But pre-emption presupposes the ability to know things -- to know about threats with a degree of certainty not requisite for decisions less momentous than those for waging war. Some say the war was justified even if WMDs are not found nor their destruction explained, because the world is "better off" without Saddam. Of course it is better off. But unless one is prepared to postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily dismantle any tyranny -- on to Burma? -- it is unacceptable to argue that Saddam's mass graves and torture chambers suffice as retrospective justifications for pre-emptive war. Americans seem sanguine about the failure -- so far -- to validate the war's premise about the threat posed by Saddam's WMDs, but a long-term failure would unravel much of this president's policy and rhetoric. Saddam, forced by the defection of his son-in-law, acknowledged in the mid-1990s his possession of chemical and biological WMDs. President Clinton, British, French and German intelligence agencies and even Hans Blix (who tells the British newspaper The Guardian, "We know for sure that they did exist") have expressed certainty about Iraq having WMDs at some point. A vast multinational conspiracy of bad faith, using fictitious WMDs as a pretext for war, is a wildly implausible explanation of the failure to find WMDs. What is plausible? James Woolsey, President Clinton's first CIA director, suggests the following: As war approached, Saddam, a killer but not a fighter, was a parochial figure who had not left Iraq since 1979. He was surrounded by terrified sycophants and several Russian advisers who assured him that if Russia could not subdue Grozny in Chechnya, casualty-averse Americans would not conquer Baghdad. Based on his experience in the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam assumed there would be a ground offensive only after prolonged bombing. U.S. forces would conquer the desert, then stop. He could manufacture civilian casualties -- perhaps by blowing up some of his own hospitals -- to inflame world opinion, and count on his European friends to force a halt in the war, based on his promise to open Iraq to inspections, having destroyed his WMDs on the eve of war. Or shortly after the war began. Saddam, suggests Woolsey, was stunned when Gen. Tommy Franks began the air and ground offenses simultaneously and then "pulled a Patton," saying, in effect, never mind my flanks, I'll move so fast they can't find my flanks. Saddam, Woolsey suggests, may have moved fast to destroy the material that was the justification for a war he intended to survive, and may have survived. Such destruction need not have been a huge task. In Britain, where political discourse is far fiercer than in America, Tony Blair is being roasted about the missing WMDs by, among many others, Robin Cook, formerly his foreign secretary. Cook says: "Such weapons require substantial industrial plant and a large work force. It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq." Rubbish, says Woolsey: Chemical or biological weapons could have been manufactured with minor modifications of a fertilizer plant, or in a plant as small as a microbrewery attached to a restaurant. The 8,500 liters of anthrax that Saddam once admitted to having would weigh about 8.5 tons and would fill about half of a tractor-trailer truck. The 25,000 liters that Colin Powell cited in his U.N. speech could be concealed in two trucks -- or in much less space if the anthrax were powdered. For the president, the missing WMDs are not a political problem. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, says Americans are happily focused on Iraqis liberated rather than WMDs not found, so we "feel good about ourselves." But unless America's foreign policy is New Age therapy to make the public feel mellow, feeling good about the consequences of an action does not obviate the need to assess the original rationale for the action. Until WMDs are found, or their absence accounted for, there is urgent explaining to be done.
Seems unbelievably ignorant to me. At least coming from an American. This is a country borne of a multiplicity of ideals. Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution of the Bill of Rights? Do you have any idea what country you live in!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? The very bedrock of this Nation is founded not only in the tolerance for a brilliant diversity of political, religious, ethnic, and social concepts - it is founded in the GUARANTEE that all should be embraced, and protected from the tyranny of totalitarianism, and intolerance. If you can't abide dissent and diversity in your society you are damned to a solitary and desolate existence. No thanks.
The very bedrock of this Nation is founded not only in the tolerance for a brilliant diversity of political, religious, ethnic, and social concepts - it is founded in the GUARANTEE that all should be embraced, and protected from the tyranny of totalitarianism, and intolerance. _________________________ This all sounds great and should be but until you live in a region or among people who live in this country and are daily not protected from the tyranny of totalitarianism and intolerance forced upon them by the liberals and their tools in the federal agencies, then you are only theorizing. I have read the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Federalist Papers, have taken classes on them and one of my good friends teaches seminars on them. Your head is clearly in the sand on the breaches of the Constitution and the others under Clinton/Gore administration. I am simply saying that the liberals are so adamant to change the rule of law that there may be no way to reconcile the differences. I believe in personal property, personal liberty, states rights, and county government rights and those three documents, as they were written. I do not believe in law making by judicial decree and I see no justification for it in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or Federalist Papers. I was testifying before a state senate committee about 3 years ago when a senator asked a liberal attorney why he ran around the state suing everybody all the time. The liberal attorney said "because you don't pass the laws we want" even though just a minute percent of the citizens support his position. What is not totalitarian and intolerant about that attitude?
Week before last I read an article about debate on the permannent repeal of the death (inheritance) tax and the focus of the article was about a wonderful liberal organization called The Nature Conservancy. The TNC was lobbying against the repeal of the death tax so that the property owners would be forced to sell the property to pay the tax and then the TNC could get its' hands on the property so they could in turn sell at least a portion of the basically confiscated property to the federal government and the rest to some wealthy liberal from somewhere. This is real tolerance, compassion, and not a sign of totalitarianism. Some of the properties they want have been in the family for generations but all TNC cares about is the cash to be made and the roll over. This to me dwarfs anything Haliburton has done, at least to individuals who are being forced out.
Naked forgery -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 11, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com On Oct. 27, 1941, FDR, locked in mortal combat with an America First Committee that was resisting his drive to war, played his trump. On Navy Day, at the Mayflower Hotel, FDR declared, "I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's Government â by planners of the New World Order. ... It is a map of South America ... as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. ... This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well." Roosevelt was not done. I also have, he informed his audience, a Nazi document detailing plans "to abolish all existing religions, liquidate all clergy and create an 'International Nazi Church.' "In the place of the Bible, the words of 'Mein Kampf' will be imposed and enforced in a Holy Writ. And in the place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols â the swastika and the naked sword. ... The God of Blood and Iron will take the place of the God of Love and Mercy." The Nazi plans for eradicating Christianity were never found. And the map? A forgery by British agent Ivar Bryce, who worked under Churchill's man William Stephenson, who had been given his mission: Provoke America to go to war with Germany. As Nicholas Cull relates in "Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American 'Neutrality' in World War II," the "most striking feature" of Bryce's fake map "was the complicity of the president of the United States in perpetrating this fraud." In his address to Congress calling for war, after Pearl Harbor, FDR did not even mention Germany. Yet Hitler stunned the world by declaring war on America. Why? Among the reasons cited by Germany was the provocation of FDR's Navy Day speech and fake map. Stephenson's forgery was a triumph and served a backdrop for Clare Luce's remark that Roosevelt "lied us into war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it." Though Stephenson used fraud and blackmail to goad us into a war that killed and wounded a million Americans, he is the hero of the best-seller "A Man Called Intrepid." And not only has FDR been forgiven, he has been celebrated. His lies, it is said, were noble lies, to rouse an isolationist America into doing its duty and ridding the world of Adolf Hitler. But it all depends on how a war turns out. And that is the problem for the president. In the 2003 State of the Union, he declared: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." For those who opposed war with Iraq as necessary, this was riveting. If Saddam was building nuclear weapons, the case for war was far more compelling than if all he had were Scuds, mustard gas and anthrax he could not deliver. Days after the president spoke, Dick Cheney raised anew the awful specter: "We believe he has ... reconstituted nuclear weapons." Now, with Americans dying daily in our own Gaza Strip in Iraq, we learn that the critical document on which the president relied was also a naked forgery. Someone fabricated the document that supposedly proved Iraq was secretly trying to buy uranium from Niger. Moreover, the CIA knew the truth, as ex-ambassador Joe Wilson had been sent to Niger to ferret it out. And Wilson had returned to report that the nuclear link to Iraq did not exist. So, two questions remain. Who forged the Niger document? Who put the lie in the president's State of the Union address? Fingers are being pointed in all directions. President Bush gave the British government as his source, leading one to suspect the heirs of Bryce and Stephenson. The Brits point to the CIA. The Washington Post said that a foreign intelligence agency was the source. CNN cited officials who said it was not the Brits or Mossad. Lately, Italy has popped up as a possible source â and the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi. Whoever did it, the forgery â so crude it suggests the author knew his recipient wanted it so badly he would not bother to verify it â was a war crime, a deliberate provocation of the United States to instigate a war on a country that did not threaten America. "An enemy has done this to us," the Bible reads. Congress should find out who that enemy is. With American kids dying in a new war in Iraq that has no end in sight, we have a right to know who deceived the president â who lied us into war. Patrick J. Buchanan
Trading on fear From the start, the invasion of Iraq was seen in the US as a marketing project. Selling 'Brand America' abroad was an abject failure; but at home, it worked. Manufacturers of 4x4s, oil prospectors, the nuclear power industry, politicians keen to roll back civil liberties - all seized the moment to capitalise on the war. PR analysts Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber explain how it worked. Saturday July 12, 2003 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,995669,00.html
Choking on regulations This week, the libertarian Cato Institute released a study chronicling the number and cost of Washington-mandated regulations. In Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Shapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, author Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. passes along some stunning information. For example, the 2002 Federal Register is the largest in history, with more than 4,000 rules covering 75,606 pages. The number is growing rapidly by the year. Back in 1990, there were less than 50,000 pages; in 1970, less than 21,000; and 1950 less than 10,000. The Supreme Court may say whatever it wants about privacy in the bedroom, but the mind-boggling number of federal rules make clear that there is very little in our lives that isn't regulated by the government somehow. As Mr. Crews points out, "Only five agencies are responsible for more than half of this torrent: the Environmental Protection Agency (surprise!) and the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, Agriculture and Interior." Green regs, workplace safety and personal health rules are the most persistent. Of all the federal departments, the EPA spends the most on enforcement, with $4.4 billion set aside for policing this year alone. The expense doesn't all go to worthy causes, such as making sure Lake Erie doesn't catch on fire. One of the silly EPA regs revealed by the study is a mission to crack down on air pollution caused by plywood. While most regulatory trends are bad in their meddlesomeness, there is some improvement in some areas, and some new rules are justifiable. For example, there are many new rules governing the expanded federal role in homeland security, and a tiny number of regulations are on the books to get rid of other regulations. We could use more of these latter rules, to be sure. Cato's examination of Washington's "Ten Thousand Commandments" reminds us of the unpleasant reality that the era of big government is far from over. The enormous size of the regulatory state is a heavy millstone around the neck of the U.S. economy. At an estimated cost of $860 billion, regulatory spending is larger than the GDP of Canada, about one-third the size of our federal budget and makes the $158 billion budget deficit look like chicken feed. Changing this bureaucratic nightmare is no simple proposition. Although Rep. J.D. Hayworth has written a sensible bill to require Congress to approve major federal regulations, we're not holding our breath that his colleagues want to grab hold of this hot potato. As it is, congressmen can vote for vague, noble-sounding bills and never look back, leaving implementation to the bureaucracy. The system is such that no one electable is directly accountable. This is government run amok at its worst, but we shouldn't expect bureaucrats to fix the mess because we can't vote out a bureaucrat. If congressmen were required to vote up or down on major regulations, they would have to defend them at the next election. Perhaps then the Federal Register would finally start to shrink Want more evidence of totalitarian and intolerant?