Drudge is reporting that MAnn said she would vote for Hillary over McCain.
God I hate her.
Hey MAnn – the perfect is the enemy of the good.
And Michelle “Internment Rocks!” Malkin is in the usual hysterics about a McCain candidacy.
What is it about female conservative pundits that make me want to punch a kitten?
**UPDATE**
I think she (Hillary) would be stronger on the war on terrorism.
Hillary is absolutely more conservative. Moreover, she lies less than John McCain…she’s smarter than John McCain so that when she’s caught shamelessly lying, at least the Clintons know they’ve been caught lying.
Are you KIDDING ME! I’m so glad I don’t own a cat right now.
I tried to explain, for those whose feelings were so hurt they didn’t even crack the spine, that the title “Liberal Fascism” comes from a speech delivered by H.G. Wells, one of the most important and influential progressive and socialist intellectuals of the 20th century. He wanted to re-brand liberalism as “liberal fascism” and even “enlightened Nazism.” He believed these terms best described his own political views — views that deeply informed American progressivism and New Deal liberalism.
I’m reading through his book right now, and I think a better title would have been Worship of the State or perhaps No God But Government. Yes, the title Liberal Fascism may have a serious intellectual pedigree from H.G. Wells (who, incidentally, was attacked as a heretic by no other than one of Goldberg’s heroes, G.K. Chesterton). But I can’t blame contemporary liberals for dismissing the book as an attack. Conservatives are rightly upset when accused of fascism, and liberals have a right to be upset, too. Why did he make it so easy for others to dismiss him as a hack when he’s anything but?
Goldberg attempts to explain the main reason for picking the inflammatory title:
As much as it may shock some, I’m not the first person to set the record straight. Maybe those authors didn’t penetrate the public debate because they tend to write books titled “Illiberal Policymaking and Culture Formation, the Anglo-American Experience, 1912-2007.” If I’d followed their example, no one would be buying my book, reading it or discussing it. And, you can be sure, I wouldn’t have been invited on to “The Daily Show” to get smacked around for 20 minutes.
So far, the book is filled with useful correctives to the standard left-wing version of history (I have a few other issues with it that I’ll try to expand on once I’m finished). I still don’t think that the choice of title was a wise idea. A book cannot change minds if they’re too offended by the title to take it seriously. As it is, I expect Mr. Goldberg to sell lots of books to like-minded conservatives, but to change the minds of very few modern liberals. (Then again, his epilogue “The Tempting of Conservatism” hints that his primary audience might not be modern liberals but modern conservatives. Again, I’ll know better once I’ve finished.)
It’s one thing for a hack like Ann Coulter to write shoddy polemics with inflammatory titles like Godless or Treason. It’s something more serious and frustrating when thoughtful conservatives like Jonah Goldberg or Ramesh “The Party of Death” Ponnuru do the same. I don’t know why they’re cutting themselves off at the knees like this, but they need to start being more constructive.
Every now and then, you see something about somebody’s parents that makes you understand them better. Ann Coulter had one of those moments in her column today about her late father:
When Mother was in a rehabilitative facility briefly after surgery a few years ago and Father was not supposed to be driving, we were relieved that a snowstorm had knocked out the power to the garage door opener, so Daddy couldn’t get to the car. It would just be a week and then Mother would be home.
My brother came home to check on Father the first day of this arrangement to find that he had taken an ax to the side door of the garage, so he could drive to the rehab center and sit with Mother all day.
Miss Coulter’s preference for the battleaxe over the stiletto is apparently hereditary. John Vincent Coulter, RIP.
The Anchoress gets into a wonderful tussle with Ann Coulter apologists, who’ve dismissed her recent interview on Judaism with a shug and an “Oh, well, that’s Anne!:
Coulter obviously did NOT say Jews should be wiped off the planet, that was her host’s interpretation and the left, of course, will run with it. I don’t think she is an anti-semite at all, she is simply trying to express an idea, and doing it very badly, in an environment that is not going to help her do it better.
If you read that transcript to the end, you can see where Coulter tries to clarify her meaning, but she can’t, partly because a sound-bite forum is NO PLACE for that sort of deep and too-easily-misunderstood discussion, and partly because her host is, from his perspective as a Jew, unsurprisingly appalled by what he is hearing, by what he thinks Coulter is saying. This is a discussion best left to someone with a gift for diplomacy, a deft tongue and a loving, civil and collected mien. It is is absolutely not a discussion that should be undertaken by someone who has the deftness of a hammer and the mien of a German Shepherd.
…
What I have said here is that she was clumsy, unclear and incoherent in her expression of that idea – that a soundbite forum is no place to try to express it well – and in so being she has managed to give handfuls of red meat to people who have absolutely no intention of allowing clarification, are not interested in clarifying for her, and thus she has given Christian caricaturists a heavy dose of “see? See what they’re like” to back them up.
She then drives the point home with a wonderfully sarcastic post about how she “wishes” everyone were Catholic:
If all Americans were Catholic that means that all the government would be Catholic! Yaaaaay! Everyone would be pro-life! There would be Nativity creche’s and Ten Commandments in all the government buildings! The president would be a Catholic! We’d have Mass at the White House! And Bingo! Insurance companies would not have to cover birth control pills! And Jack Chick would no longer be publishing hate screeds because he’d be a Catholic too! Yaaaaay! The government would fix immigration policies so all our fellow Catholics down in Mexico can come on in and feel welcome and worship with us! Yaaaay! Then we’d go get those Canadians back into church too! And then England! We’d take back Westminster Abbey! Yaaaaay!
I mean, the Protestants – they’re okay now…as long as they’re you know, believing and stuff. But if all the Protestants would just come back to the Roman Catholic church from which they separated themselves, they would be really, really full Christians! America would be perfect!
Very, very well said. But I think she’s missing something which, to my chagrin, has also eluded otherwise smart people like Dennis Prager: many Christians ultimately beleive that if you don’t agree with them on a few points of theology, God hates you and will send you to burn in Hell for all eternity. That’s an ugly, despicable, elistist, mean-spirited, self-congratulatory view and there’s not a nice way of putting it. Contrast that with the Anchoress, who is delightful and respectful:
If they they want to, that’s very nice, and I’m happy to welcome them, but honestly, I don’t look for it. I think everyone finds their own way to God, and worships in the manner they best understand, are more opened to, etc. And that’s fine by me because I don’t have a need to decide who goes to heaven and who doesn’t, or who’s got the better way to get there. I have my way; I like it – if you have your’s, God bless you. I am ever a “live and let live” kind of girl.
MAnn Coulter’s personal fantasy is to deny women the right to vote?
What the hell did the right do to deserve this woman? I mean I know we have our faults – George W. isn’t exactly knocking things out of the park for us. Still, a scary, transvestite homophobe isn’t exactly the spokesman I’d want for our side. Then again maybe god really does have a sense of humor.
All our problems could be solved if MAnn gets struck by a bolt of lighting, bursts into flames and is greeted in the afterlife by a scary red man with horns. Sorry, just a personal fantasy of mine.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid slammed Rush Limbaugh Monday over his recent controversial “phony soldiers” remark, despite the conservative talk-radio host’s protests that his words have been taken out of context.
Limbaugh’s comments in question came last Wednesday when he and a caller were discussing critics of the Iraq war:
“What’s really funny is, they [Iraq war critics] never talk to real soldiers,” the caller said. “They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.”
“The phony soldiers,” Limbaugh then said.
Several Democrats released statements late last week condemning the remarks and in a speech on the Senate floor Monday, Reid called the comments “so beyond the pale of decency that it cannot be left alone.”
“Just as patriotism is the exclusive realm of neither party, taking a stand against those who spew hate and impugn the integrity of our troops is a job that belongs to all of us,” Reid said.
“I can’t help but wonder how my Republican colleagues would have reacted if the tables were turned – if a well-known Democratic radio personality had used the same insulting line of attack against troops who support the war,” the Nevada Democrat added.
Gosh Harry, let me think about this. Let me think (*cough* Gen. Betray-Us *cough*) really, really hard.
Despite what you hear from most of the right — and, apparently, Senator Reid — there’s nothing inherently wrong in criticizing, grilling, or lambasting active duty military personnel (unless they disagree with you).
The problem with the “General Betray-Us?” ad wasn’t that called Patreus a traitor, but that it didn’t make a very convincing argument that he was one (though I don’t believe he was entirely square with us, either). Cpl. Adam Kokesh — a former schoolmate of many Snarky Bastards — is an Iraq War vet with some very harsh things to say about the war, but that doesn’t make his arguments or behavior unassailable, either.
Our soldiers and marines are adults, capable of the same strengths and weaknesses of the rest of us. We owe them special attention for their service and experience; we don’t owe them agreement
EDIT: Yes, I know what Rush was talking about when he said “Phony soldiers.”
There are two reasons why this should end any further consideration of these men for president (not that there ever was much, thank God):
First, it will have an effect on policy. It’s a lot harder to counter environmental alarmism without being able to cite the natural ebb and flow of climate change over Earth’s 4.5 billion year history. It’s difficult to make sound judgments in terms of awarding grant money when you believe a whole class of scientists base their research on hooey. And having a president openly on the side of the Creationists and the Intelligent Design crowds can only have a negative affect on primary education.
But important as these issues are, they’re not the most important of this election cycle. What is crucial in the next election — and if we learn nothing else from the president’s bungling of the Iraq War, let it be this — is that we must have a president who can consistently dismiss preconceived beliefs if he finds they are contradicted by reality. By stating that they don’t believe in the foundational theory of biology, these three men are admitting they are incapable of doing that.
As an aspiring pundit, I deplore all attempts to politicize the Virginia Tech murders. Except those I agree with.
In what can only be described as an interesting article on American Thinker, James Lewis wonders whether the values Cho was exposed to through Virginia Tech’s English Department contributed to the atrocity.
Still, I wonder — was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes — did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently — was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?
And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho’s English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.
My only exposure to the Virginia Tech’s English Department being the universally-lauded non-eulogy written by Nikki Giovanni, my initial reaction was a decided “maybe.” But as I read the rest of Lewis’ article, something didn’t smell right. The list of courses he described seemed just a little too awful.
I wonder if Cho took the senior seminar by Professor Knapp, on “The self-justifying criminal in literature.” Because he certainly learned to be a self-justifying criminal. Or whether he sat in courses with Nikki Giovanni, using her famous self-glorifying book, “The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni (2003)“. Maybe he read Professor Bernice Hausman’s“Changing Sex: Transsexualism, technology, and the idea of gender” — just the thing for a disoriented young male suffering from massive culture shock on the hypersexual American campus. And even more gender-bending from Professor Paul Heilker, who wrote “Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude).” Or the Lesbian love stories of Professor Matthew Vollmer. Yup, that’s just what this student needs. These trophy “art works” are all advertised on the English Department faculty websites.
Interestingly, those courses did not appear in the Spring 2007 English Undergraduate Course Descriptions, nor in the same document for Fall 2006. The words “Girly-Man,” “Androgyny,” and “Transsexualism” do not appear in either document.
Here is, however, a cherry-picked list of traditional courses the department offers:
English 1634: Introduction to Shakespeare
English 2515: Survey of British Literature
English 2526: Survey of American Literature II
English 4214: Milton
English 4624: British Author Post-1800-Wilde and Kipling
English 4784: Senior Seminar: Dante
Also, none of the courses above were taught by professors Heilker, Giovanni or Hausman, the three cited in Lewis’ piece. Maybe he’s looking at the graduate school (that smells right), but Cho was an undergrad senior. If you go through the catalog, you’ll see a number of courses a little to left of the cannon, but nothing like those cited by Lewis.
While it’s entirely possible that Cho’s English classes played a role in the massacre, I don’t think we can make that judgment based on Lewis’ piece.
D’Souza writes: “One might expect the Right to be open to a candid evaluation of what’s going wrong and how it might be fixed.”
In fact, that is what the surge, the appointment of Gen. Petraeus, and changes at the Pentagon are all about. Such adjustments are all preferable to D’Souza’s remedy of demonizing, in the middle of a war, millions of Americans at home in order to win approval from conservative Muslims abroad who supposedly, with justification, hate the popular culture of the United States to the point of partially supporting those who wish to destroy this country.
At National Review alone, wide-ranging disagreements arise over the war, from support for the current democratization of the Middle East to the “more rubble, less trouble” school of thought to the “win now, or get out” chorus. D’Souza knows that at the Hoover Institution there are at least four or five different positions voiced regarding Iraq and the larger war.
True, it is the singular achievement of D’Souza that his bizarre writ has for a moment earned universal condemnation from those who can agree on little else. But that rare consensus represents not a “closing of the conservative mind” so much as it reflects the moral vileness of much of what D’Souza writes. And pathetically, the more frequently conservative magazines, media, and institutions offer D’Souza a megaphone, the more apt he is to play the wounded fawn.
Read it all. Hopefully, this coultergeist has been exorcised.
Based on my reading of the first 70 pages of The God Delusion, I can say with some confidence that Richard Dawkins — to my surprise — treats the subject of theism seriously, thoughtfully, and rationally. Based on conversations with Hubbard, I can say with equal assurance that Ramesh Ponnuru gives abortion the same treatment in The Party of Death.
Why, however, have two such intelligent and thoughtful authors — both writing to change the minds of those who disagree with them through reason and argument — chosen such inflammatory titles?
Certainly, there’s a marketing value to shock, and both titles are memorable by virtue of it. While that might appeal to potential readers of Sean Hannity or Michael Moore, I can’t believe the open-minded theists and pro-choicers Dawkins and Ponnuru are courting will be likely to pick up a books that give every appearance of being written by bullies who disagree with them.
Second, I can’t imagine that anyone would want to be seen reading either of these books in public, unless they’re actively seeking a verbal or physical fight. Frankly, I wouldn’t be caught dead with either of these books on a subway, bus or airplane, simply because I wouldn’t want to deal with the angry zealot or self-righteous feminazi who would undoubtedly take the seat next to me.
In fact, since the cultural Left in America is de facto allied with the radical Muslims, we as conservatives have no choice but to ally with the traditional Muslims.
Do what?
[Conservatives'] values are quite similar to those of traditional Muslims.There’s no point chasing after “liberals” who believe in secularism and feminism and homosexual rights. Such people are quite rare and they have no constituency in any Muslim country. The traditional Muslims are our best bet. Besides, they’re not asking us to live like them. They’re asking us not to attack their religion, which conservatives do with depressing regularity. They’re asking us not to force secularism and separation of church and state on their society, another foolish cause to which some conservatives subscribe.
I’m guessing that by “homosexual rights” here, D’Souza is referring to the belief that we shouldn’t execute people for being gay, because that’s considered “liberal” in the Muslim world. Indeed, any American conservative would be a flaming Leftist in any Muslim-majority country. In any Muslim-majority country, “traditional Muslims” of the sort that D’Souza here supports live in a level of barbarous depravity I don’t even like to think about. Cruelty and subjugation, economic and social backwardness, ignorance and irrationality: those are the hallmarks of the lives of “traditional Muslims.” I have little in common with them besides a shared humanity, and sometimes I even doubt that. When D’Souza says, “These people are also religious and socially conservative, and they are our natural allies,” he slurs American religious and social conservatives to such a degree that, were this not on a conservative website, I might believe it a forgery. As is, I’m slack-jawed.
What’s interesting is this question: Who does D’Souza slur worse, conservatives or the Left?
…I am attacking the Left’s values at home, and exposing a link between the Left and the Islamic radicals that is the great unspoken secret of American politics. Basically the Islamic radicals supply the terror and the Left uses the terror to demoralize the American people and urge them to pull American troops out of Iraq and the Middle East. So on the one hand the Left dislikes the values of the Islamic radicals, and on the other the Left needs the Islamic radicals to fulfill its core mission in America, which is to wipe out the Right and send us back to the margins of American politics.
Again: What?
But news flash: The liberals already know that the Islamic radicals don’t like them. They have made a tactical decision to ally with the radicals abroad to defeat the conservatives at home.
Dammit, D’Souza’s been possessed by the Coultergeist. The charge of treason should not be used like a nuclear warhead, to destroy indiscriminately within groups. It is a dangerous charge, but one which, in a liberal democracy, only remains pungent when used accurately. It should be used as a guided missile, to hit deserving individuals and scare those nearby into reform. D’Souza may not say “treason,” but his book is named The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, so he might as well.
He doesn’t bring it up in this interview, but as the title of the book suggests, he’s saying that the Left provoked 9/11:
I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the non-profit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.
To which I say: “So frickin’ what?” That the Left is wrong and advocates evil policies is completely beside the point here. Those people are my countrymen, and that may not mean much to the treason-mongers, but it still means something to me. How on Earth can we expect people who disagree with American policies to remain loyal to America despite that disagreement if we use that disagreement as a basis for charging treason, and use those people as an excuse for the evils of our enemies? There are some on the Left who have indeed abandoned America in their heart, but so long as they remain Americans, we should not abandon them. Being a patriot means loving your country because it is your country, and your countrymen because they are your countrymen.
If Muslims don’t like what the American Left does, bully for them. Neither do I. But I don’t blow up buildings because of it, and I won’t blame the evil of foreigners on my fellow Americans. The American Left can advocate its particular lunacies because of the freedoms laid down at the Founding, freedoms that ought not be conditioned on the threats of violent foreigners.
I have in the past recommended Dinesh D’Souza to others as a thoughtful and articulate conservative. I will not do so in the future.