...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Tuesday, July 01, 2003
      ( 2:26 PM )
 
Treason

Treason: \Trea"son\, n. 1. The offense of attempting to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance, or of betraying the state into the hands of a foreign power; disloyalty; treachery. 2. Loosely, the betrayal of any trust or confidence; treachery; perfidy. (Webster)

A great post on Seeing the Forest today on Anne Coulter's new book Treason. He discusses Richard Cohen's article today about the book:

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.

I have to agree wtih Dave at Forest that Cohen isn't taking it seriously enough. While I admire his ability to mock Coulter, as she and her writing justly deserve, the truth of the matter is that her rhetoric is the stuff of ditto-meisters everywhere. That solid chunk of Americana that is happily esconced in its cognitive dissonance will read her words and begin to echo them in the truest neo-con tradition and soon, without the help of cable tv pundits (who most assuredly will help the process along), they will begin using them as generally-held beliefs among Americans. I can only hope her book goes the way of all ludicrous writing - to the circular file.

She was making the rounds on Friday's talk shows from what I saw when I got home from work. The major question thrown at her was how does she think her book will do compared to Hillary. Of course, once she got her tongue lashing of Senator Clinton out of the way, she moved on to explain some of her major theses in her book. The main one is that "liberals" are committing treason by the virtual act of dissent. She went on to discuss poor old McCarthy and how he got a baaaaaad rap. He was actually serving this country and he was doing his PATRIOTIC duty in his hunt for those traitors of Almighty America! She actually defended McCarthyism...with a straight face.

As Dave says:

The right has destroyed the civility of our society.
They have made it OK to be nasty, insulting, mocking
and dismissive of more than half of all Americans. And
they are proud of it. Now this book takes their anti-civility
campaign a lot further. The book accuses everyone left
of the Christian Coalition of hating and conspiring to
destroy America.

Barney Gumble has a link to this article about the book as well. Thinking people will agree:

With her new book ... syndicated pundit Ann Coulter has driven
the national discourse to a new low. No longer content to merely
smear liberals and the media with sweeping generalizations and
fraudulent evidence, she has now upped the ante, accusing the
entire Democratic Party as well as liberals and leftists nationwide of
treason, a crime of disloyalty against the United States. But, as in her
syndicated columns (many of which are adapted in the book) and her
previous book Slander: Liberal Lies Against the American Right,
Coulter's case relies in large part on irrational rhetoric and pervasive
factual errors and deceptions. Regardless of your opinions about
Democrats, liberals or the left, her work should not be taken at face value.


...the question is, what does it matter how thinking people view her book? Her book isn't for them. The republican gloves came off long ago, but now we see that as Ms. Coulter is lauded and praised for this work of insidious hatred and crass debasing of historically held beliefs in this country, the neo-cons will not rest until they can literally destroy their enemy. See, the thing is, equating liberals with "treason" is not akin to McCarthyism...it's akin to Fascism.

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