Annthrax Coulter's grasp of facts worse than her judgement
Tempest
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..
By Joe Conason
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/07/04/treason/?ref=null
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."
In that passage -- footnoted to James Chace's magisterial 1998 biography
of Acheson -- Coulter demonstrates that she is both an intentional liar
and an incompetent writer. The pages she cites from Chace explain quite
clearly that Acheson (who was not then Secretary of State and would not
be promoted to that office until 1949) was urged to avoid the New York
reception by Secretary of State James Byrnes, not Truman. The British
apparently didn't notice that "ostentatious rebuff," since they
immediately invited Acheson and his wife to a cordial lunch with
Churchill in Washington. And as for Truman, Chace notes that it was he
who had invited Churchill to Missouri, his home state, to deliver the
speech -- which the American president read in advance, assuring the
former prime minister that his strong warning about communist intentions
would "do nothing but good."
So replete is "Treason" with falsehoods and distortions, as well as so
much plain bullshit, that it may well create a cottage industry of
corrective fact-checking, just as "Slander" did last year. (The fun has
already begun with Brendan Nyhan's devastating review on the Spinsanity
Web site. So far the Spinsanity sages have found "at least five factual
claims that are indisputably false" in "Treason," along
with the usual Coulter techniques of phony quotation, misleading
sourcing, and sentences ripped from context or falsely attributed.)
Such heavy-handed deception was precisely the sort of tactic employed by
McCarthy himself against Acheson and all his other targets. In his
book "McCarthyism: The Fight for America," for instance, he charged that
the Truman aide had "hailed the Communist victory in China as 'a new day
which has dawned in Asia.'" Of course, Acheson had neither said nor
written anything of the kind.
To Coulter, McCarthy is simply a great man worthy of her emulation. In
her alternate universe, he isn't the slimy traducer Americans have come
to know and despise. He's bright, witty, warm-hearted and macho, a
sincere farm boy who exposes the treasonous cowardice of the urbane
Acheson, Marshall and other "sniffing pantywaists." She seems to regard
him as kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, albeit with jowls and five o'clock
shadow and a serious drinking problem.
And he never, ever attacked anyone who didn'tdeserve it.
"His targets were Soviet sympathizers and Soviet spies," Coulter
proclaims without qualification. But elsewhere she says that he wasn't
even really trying to find either communists or spies, but only seeking
to expose "security risks" in government jobs. Whatever his mission, it
was noble and succeeding admirably until 1954, when "liberals
immobilized him with their Army-McCarthy hearings and censure
investigation."
Actually, McCarthy was brought down by his own televised misconduct
during those hearings -- and by the outrage not of Democrats but of
Republicans, including President Eisenhower and a caucus of courageous
GOP senators. (Among the latter was the current president's grandfather,
Prescott Bush of Connecticut, whose vote to censure McCarthy is another
little fact that Coulter forgets to mention.)
The truth is that some of McCarthy's targets were or had been communists
-- and therefore by definition "sympathizers" of the Soviet Union -- but
he never uncovered a single indictable spy. There had been dozens of
Soviet agents in government before and during World War II. But those
espionage rings had been broken up by the FBI well before McCarthy
showed up brandishing a bogus "list" of 57 or 205 or 81 Communists in
the State Department.
Yet the Wisconsin windbag amassed sufficient power for a time to destroy
innocent individuals, most notably Owen Lattimore, described smirkingly
by Coulter as McCarthy's "biggest star" and the man he once named as
Stalin's "top espionage agent" in the United States. "Somewhat
surprisingly," as Coulter is obliged to note, Lattimore's name has yet
to be found in Moscow's excavated KGB archives or in the Venona cables
decrypted by U.S. Army counterespionage agents. The dearth of evidence
against Lattimore matters not at all to Coulter, however. Though the
eminent China expert was neither a spy nor a communist, he certainly
knew and worked with some communists -- and worst of all, he disagreed
with the far right about U.S. policy toward China.
Then there are names that Coulter doesn't dare name, such as Theodore
Kaghan, a favorite McCarthy target who worked for the Voice of America.
In fact, she doesn't mention the Voice of America investigation at all,
perhaps because it was so obviously a destructive waste of time and
money. Kaghan, a valiant opponent of the communists in Berlin, was
dismissed from his VOA position under pressure from McCarthy. He was
wholly innocent, but the reckless senator's inquisition ruined him and
sabotaged Western interests. That same destructive pattern occurred in
the State Department, in the Army Signal Corps, and in other government
agencies. His ham-handed brutality made McCarthy an immense boon to
communist propaganda abroad, especially in Europe. They loved it when
his counsel Roy Cohn and his assistant David Schine junketed around the
continent, tasked with removing thousands of "pro-communist" books from
the shelves of U.S.-funded libraries.
To transform McCarthy into a hero, Coulter carefully airbrushes all
these unpleasant episodes from his career. "This version will be
unfamiliar to most Americans inasmuch as it includes facts," she
explains, introducing her biographical sketch of the Wisconsin senator.
Perhaps it includes some facts, but it certainly omits others.
Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in
considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention
McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous
1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war
crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during
the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war
had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were
sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a
frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened
in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of
the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American
investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an
interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the
pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy
case to
whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for
his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf
Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and
to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified
as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in
Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The
S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although
most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to
former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy
had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and
casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.
By Coulter's loose definition, his involvement in the Malmedy incident
proves that McCarthy was a "traitor." He lied publicly to advance
totalitarian forces in Europe against American interests. He sided with
enemy forces against American soldiers. He falsely accused American
officials of crimes. Moreover, he took up this tainted cause at least in
part because of heavy financial support from an ultra-right-wing
German-American businessman in Wisconsin. He managed to help both Nazis
and communists at once, a feat rarely seen since the end of the
Hitler-Stalin pact.
That irony would be lost on Coulter, as she proceeds with her
single-minded smearing of Democrats and liberals. It turns out that all
her raking over the ancient history of communism and anti-communism
serves only as preparation to construct false contemporary analogies.
Just as anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was a traitor, so was anyone
who opposed the war in Vietnam or dissented from Reagan's war in
Nicaragua or doubted Bush's war in Iraq.
In Coulter's beloved country there is no place for debate, only
conformity. And in "Treason" there is no space for the complicated,
mundane reality of American political life. Conservatives good, liberals
bad, is her shrieking mantra. She knows what her audience will buy --
and that most of them aren't bright enough to notice the contradictions.
So while Patrick Buchanan is a good guy when he red-baits liberals
during the Reagan era, he suddenly disappears from the pages of
"Treason" when he opposes the war in Iraq. For that matter, so do all
the right-wing critics of Bush's war, from Republican Rep. Ron Paul of
Texas to the entire staff of the ultra-right Cato Institute. Their
existence can't be acknowledged -- because if they do exist, they are
"traitors," too. And there is no such creature as a right-wing traitor
(which means that the dozens of Americans convicted of spying for Nazi
Germany in 1942, the political leadership of the Confederacy, the Tories
of the Revolutionary era, Timothy McVeigh, and Robert Hanssen all,
naturally, go unmentioned in "Treason").
Likewise absent from Coulter's cracked cosmology are the liberals and
Democrats who supported the Iraq war, including dozens of senators,
members of Congress, the editors of the New Republic, the Democratic
Leadership Council, and writers such as Paul Berman and Kenneth Pollack.
According to her, Democrats voted for the war resolution only because
they feared their true treasonous nature would otherwise be exposed. In
fact, their votes in favor of Bush's resolution perversely proved that
they were traitors!
"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they
didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark
raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a
desire to aid the enemy." Somebody is raving here, but it isn't a
liberal. With this book, Coulter has paid her homage and surpassed her
master.
From now on, maybe we should call it Coulterism.
--
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Teddy Roosevelt