My Turn at Bat with a Joe McCarthy post.

I Dare Call It Treason (by Ann Coulter)

June 25, 2003

THE MYTH OF 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism.

Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime

utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.'

At the time, half the country realized liberals were lying. But after a half century of liberal myth-making, even the disgorging of Soviet and American archives half a century later could not overcome their lies. In 1995, the U.S. government released its cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges. Naturally, therefore, the release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times. It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of 'McCarthyism.' They were not so innocent after all, it turns out.

Soviet spies in the government were not a figment of right-wing imaginations. McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. He was tilting at an authentic communist conspiracy that had been laughed off by the Democratic Party. The Democrats had unpardonably connived with the greatest evil of the 20th century. This could not be nullified. But liberals could at least hope to redeem the Democratic Party by dedicating themselves to rewriting history and blackening reputations. This is what liberals had done repeatedly throughout the Cold War. At every strategic moment this century, liberals would wage a campaign of horrendous lies and disinformation simply to dull the discovery the American people had made. They had gotten good at it.

There were, admittedly, a few rare and striking exceptions to the left's overall obtuseness to communist totalitarianism. John F. Kennedy's pronouncements on communism could have been spoken by Joe McCarthy. For all his flaws, Truman unquestionably loved his country. He was a completely different breed from today's Democrats. Through the years, there were various epiphanic moments creating yet more anti-communist Democrats. The Stalin-Hitler pact, Alger Hiss' prothonotary warbler, information about the purges and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago' – all these had their effect.

But after World War II, the Democratic Party suffered a form of what France had succumbed to after World War I. The entire party had lost its nerve for sacrifice, heroism and bravery. Beginning in the '50s, there was a real battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. By the late '60s, the battle was over. The anti-communist Democrats had lost.

(article continued at www.anncoulter.org)

(snip)

George, do you really think a person who spews this sort of ugly venom is someone that deserves any kind of respect? Based on this column alone, I would classify Coulter as one of the most horrible human beings to achieve any notoriety during my lifetime of nearly 50 years.

You have convinced me to avoid ever reading anything by her again. I won't even try to figure out how Zero Mostel was a threat to national security.

Thanks for the laugh. This article is so 'joycemiltonesque'. Rick Deerfield

Everything in that column is accurate and irrefutable.

We've had a small flood of Joe McCarthy posts by Carnahan over time, and I decided to post one that doesn't follow the standard liberal line about McCarthy.

I agree with every word of it, I think Ann is a first-class human being, and I'll be happy to see her new book push Madame Clinton's whitewash off the the top of the charts.

Everything? That certainly wasn't true of SLANDER:

BY MICHAEL SCHERER AND SARAH SECULES

Are footnotes a foolproof defense of accuracy? The conservative pundit Ann Coulter seems to think so. When liberal columnists and bloggers alleged that her new book, Slander, misreads history, selectively (and deceptively) presents facts, and misquotes the media, Coulter pointed to the 780 footnotes that pepper her pages.

Her publisher, Crown, has corrected five errors for the book’s second printing: three minor misidentifications of public figures, an incorrect citation of The New York Times’s coverage of the race car driver Dale Earnhardt’s death, and an erroneous claim about press coverage of an Al Gore gaffe.

But what about the dozens of other allegations by Coulter’s ideological foes? CJR checked out a sample of forty alleged errors — some backed by footnotes and others not — and found that nineteen were either accurate or could generously be considered fair comment and criticism. (Though some of the latter were hyperbolic or oversimplified to the point of absurdity — “Liberals have been wrong about everything in the last half-century,” for example.) If a number of those nineteen would have raised the eyebrows of any good fact-checker, the remaining twenty-one would not pass without major debate. Here are three examples — all involving The New York Times, which consumes a major chunk of her index — of the kind of misstatements that we think Crown should consider correcting:

Coulter Claim: The New York Times columnist Frank Rich “demanded that Ashcroft stop monkeying around with Muslim terrorists and concentrate on anti-abortion extremists.” (p. 5)

Footnote: She cites an October 27, 2001 column in which Rich makes no such demands. He does chastise Ashcroft for not meeting with Planned Parenthood, which sought to offer tips on combating anthrax scares, based on its own experience with them.

Coulter Claim: Liberals called the American flag “very, very dumb.” (p. 4)

Footnote: She cites a New York Times story in which a liberal history professor, Daniel Boylan, makes no claim about the intelligence of the flag. He does criticize — as “acting very, very dumb in their patriotism” — those who have criticized Hawaii for not flying an American flag over Iolani Palace, the nineteenth century seat of the Hawaiian monarchy.

Coulter Claim: She introduces a New York Times editorial on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas headlined the youngest, cruelest justice, then writes: “Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called ‘a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,’ ‘race traitor,’ ‘black snake,’ ‘chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom’ . . . .” (p. 12)

Footnote: The passage is constructed to suggest that the Times authored these epithets, but the footnote refers readers to comments made in a Playboy article, which goes unmentioned in the book’s text. **** Michael Scherer is an assistant editor and Sarah Secules is an intern at Columbia Journalism Review.

Hoping her book is more successful than a competitor is fine. I am rather pleased with Michael Moore's success in that department. But to call someone a first class human being when they project such venom is something I find rather repugnant.

I've said nasty things, of course, and have even gone so far as to take them back later on, realizing I was out of line. Her comments appear to me to be similar to the 'Holocaust-never-happened' ones. I have now lumped her in that category.

I once said that I probably like Michael Moore about as much as you like Ann Coulter, and dislike Coulter as much as you dislike Moore. But I have to take that back. I don't agree with everything Moore does (he was out of line at the Oscars), but it appears you respect this awful woman who could only be accurately described by the C word that I am refraining from using out of respect for everyone else (I didn't used to be this diplomatic, as you know

The so-called misrepresentations in SLANDER were piddley-poop examples.

And what does that have to with the column I cited?

It is a documented ~fact~

I like her. She's no more venomous than Dershowitz, or Carville, or Begala, or Alterman, or Barney Frank or any liberal loudmouth you care to name.

It is a fact that the espionage network did indeed exist. That's been proven. It is not 'holocaust denying.'

I also correspond with her occasionally, (shock, horror, nightmare!)

I don't judge people by their politics but by how they treat me

I think the ones you posted were mostly subject to interpretation.

The 'Venona Intercepts' prove there was indeed a spy network

President Eisenhower on McCarthy:

'Senator McCarthy is, of course, so anxious for the headlines that he is prepared to go to any extremes in order to secure some mention of his name in the public press. His actions create trouble on the Hill with members of the party; they irritate, frustrate and infuriate members of the Executive Department. I really believe that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of troublemaking as to ignore him.' (diary entry, April 1, 1953)

Anti-communist activist Whittaker Chambers, on McCarthy:

'All of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long time to come.' (letter to Henry Regnery, January 14, 1954)