Wednesday, July 30, 2003

 
BOOK REVIEW: TREASON (2003) 1/2 (half a star out of 4).
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Although occasionally entertaining, Coulter's latest tirade is as inaccurate as her last book, as is well-documented throughout the Web. Here's a nice site that discusses many of the outright lies in her book, and I recommend checking that out.

It's fitting that she spends about half the book defending McCarthyism. Absurdly, she defends it by insisting that, at the time, the threat of communism was real, as though that were widely disputed by Americans. But while it's easy to see now that the threat of communism was exaggerated at the time, nobody criticized McCarthy for attacking an imaginary opponent. The only complaint against McCarthyism that I've ever heard is that the mere accusation of communism was enough to destroy a persons life or career, without the necessity of a conviction. This point, which to me is the essence of McCarthyism, is undisputed by Coulter. Rather, she concedes it, sarcasticly lamenting the people who had to flee the country after they were falsely accused of communism, saying how nice it is to live in Europe.

And, of course, Coulter is engaged in a witch-hunt of her own, falsely accusing her political enemies of treason. She seems to have just two tricks up her sleeves to defend her indefensible position. The first is the double-standard. Thus, when conservatives argue against liberal Presidents, that proves that the liberal President is a traitor on account of the veracity of those criticisms. But when Liberals argue against conservatives, that demonstrates that those liberals are traitors, on account of their opposition to the leaders of their own country. When a single historian or journalist makes a point favorable to Coulter's position, that proves Coulter's position. But when historians and journalists universally make a point unfavorable to Coulter's position, that is proof of the liberal bias of historians and journalists.

Coulter's other trick is to argue against a straw man. She takes the most outlandish position ever stated by anyone who Coulter decides is liberal, and declares it the mainstream liberal position. She takes two different, inconsistent views, held by two different people who she's decided are liberal, and then claims that this proves that the liberal position is inconsistent. She takes a single example of a liberal doing something bad and says that it proves that all liberals do this bad thing. And when she can't find even one liberal to argue for a position, she just makes it up. Over and over, she tells us that the liberals' true motives for taking a position are different from their stated motives, or what liberals would say about some hypothetical situation.

Oh, and here's a great quote that, perhaps, tells us a little about Coulter's true motives for innocently taking some of the positions she's taken. She says of all the foreigners who are more afraid of American aggression than they are of the terrorists, "They hate us? We hate them. Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell anger. Japanese Kamikazes pilots hated us once, too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons got their attention. Now they are gentle little lambs." (page 230).

In short, either Coulter is joking or she is a joke. Either way, she is impossible to take seriously.

This is The Official Record. 10:00 PM
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2003/07/book-review-treason-2003-12-half-star.html


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