Someone tell me how she was able to write two books in a year?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Jul1.html
Crackpot Conservatism
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page A13
I am happy to report that Ann Coulter has lost her mind. The evidence for this is her most recent book, "Treason," a nearly unreadable slog through every silly thing anyone on the left has ever said. Coulter conflates dissent with treason, opposition with treason, being wrong with treason, being right with treason and just about anything she doesn't like with treason. If the book were a Rorschach test, she would be institutionalized.
My glee in reporting that Coulter is daft is predicated on the prediction that her book, like her previous one, will be a bestseller. This is invariably the case with rants from the right. They tell the majority (non-liberals) that they are being controlled by the minority (liberals) -- and that most of the country's important institutions, particularly the press, are in the hands of leftists. Coulter has now taken this argument one step further. This wee minority is not merely wrong. It is traitorous.
She says the New York Times "issues traitorous editorials." She says, "Liberals relentlessly attack their own country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are." "Free speech," which those canny liberals often cite to justify their wacko ideas, "is a one-way ratchet for traitors," and "liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason." The book is a hoot.
It is also good news for liberals. It suggests that the right, at least the hard right, has finally dumbed out. This is the predictable cycle for all movements. They start with a genuine grievance and proceed from there to the totally ridiculous -- or, in some cases, to the downright macabre.
In some ways, the nutso American brand of archconservatism mirrors traditional anti-Semitism. Jew-haters proclaim that Jews control the media, international finance and almost everything else of importance -- but, somehow, Jews have accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally, the mass murder of the Holocaust. It is the same with American liberals. They control everything, and yet, somehow, the White House, both houses of Congress and, with the exception of several delis in New York, the entire business community are in the hands of conservatives. It's hard to figure.
Now Coulter has gone from the mythical to the absurd. Nonconservatives are traitors. In another country and in another age, the remedy would be apparent: expulsion or something like it. As this is America, the best she can muster is scorn, ad hominem arguments (Bill Clinton's face is a "fat, oleaginous mug"; Jimmy Carter is "often maligned for his stupidity," etc.) and the shrapnel of quotes she accumulates after she has exploded their context. Sometimes she's oblivious to her own contradictions. The trouble with liberals, she says, is that they "believe they're God." This would come as news to the pious -- but stupid -- Jimmy Carter.
But in a book that rehashes the McCarthy years, the Alger Hiss case, the House Un-American Activities Committee imbroglio, the Hollywood blacklist and everything but "I Love Lucy," Coulter finally heaves herself into the present and the war with Iraq. Mockingly, she excoriates the traitorous New York Times, which she cleverly calls "the Baghdad Times," for having said that there was "no reliable evidence" that "Saddam Hussein is connected to the Sept. 11 attack or to al Qaeda."
She goes on and on in this vein -- actually, she goes on and on in every vein -- dumbly confident as she typed that such a link would be proved. It has not -- and Coulter, as she herself must now recognize, is nothing more than the Bush administration's useful idiot.
Fairness compels me to say that Coulter scores some points. Parts of the left -- not all of it, dearie -- were unaccountably naive about communism, and as recently as the run-up to the Iraq war some of these same people again manifested an almost compulsive need to blame America for everything wrong in the world. But I think she sometimes gives the left too much credit. "The left cut down a brave man," she writes about McCarthy, forgetting that the ol' red-baiter was censured only after he had tangled with the Eisenhower administration.
Coulter's book contains the usual name-calling, the usual spinning of the facts, the occasional racial insult -- McCarthy, for instance, "took enemy fire from savage Oriental beasts" in World War II -- and it revives the charge from the 1950s that the Democratic Party is the party of traitors. "The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason," Coulter says in the last sentence of her book. When it reaches the bestseller list, as it almost surely will, we will know that the conservative movement has finally cracked up.
Happy days are here again.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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