From The New York Daily News, 7/1/03:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/...1p-87861c.html

The hard right finally dumbs out


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 best
seller.

This is invariably the case with rants from the right.

They tell the majority (nonliberals) 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.

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 have
accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally,
the Holocaust.

It is the same with liberals.

They control everything, and yet somehow the White House, both houses
of Congress and, with the exception of several New York delis,
virtually 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 age, the remedy would be apparent: expulsion or something
like it.

Since this is America, the best she can muster is scorn, ad hominem
arguments and the shrapnel of quotes she accumulates after she has
exploded their context.

Fairness compels me to say Coulter scores some points.

Parts of the left were unaccountably naive about communism, and as
recently as the run-up to the Iraq war, some of these same people
manifested an almost compulsive need to blame America for almost
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 Sen. Joe McCarthy,
forgetting that the ol' redbaiter was censured only after he tangled
with the Eisenhower administration.

When her book reaches the best-seller list, as it surely will, we'll
know the conservative movement has cracked up.

Happy days are here again.

__________________________________________________ _

Which best-seller list do you suppose that would be?

Harry

On Tue, 01 Jul 2003 09:10:48 -0400, Harry Hope <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com>
wrote:

>
>From The New York Daily News, 7/1/03:
>http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/...1p-87861c.html
>
>The hard right finally dumbs out
>
>
>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.

So, how do you differentiate between what a leftist says that is
a. True
b. Something they believe
c. Untrue
d. Something they just say off the cuff and don't believe?

Just guesswork, right?
-Rich