Ok that's a pretty strong statement. Can you tell me some examples of facts and such that Ann Coulter has wrong or has manipulated? I have read very little of her stuff, but most of what I have seen seems to be accurate, though with a lot a vehemence against the left and some spin in that direction(which I agree is annoying, but see in a far different light than the manipulation of facts that Michael Moore does, or the complete distortion of statements that Dowd has committed) If there is more to what Coulter has done, I would really like to know about it. Currently I treat her stuff with mild skepticism, and would like to know if there is reason to be more skeptical than I am of her.

Aaron:

Can you tell me some examples of facts and such that Ann Coulter has wrong or has manipulated?

Oh please God, don't get me started.

There is an entire cottage industry devoted to fact checking the crap that Coulter dishes out.

go to SpinSanity.com and search for the stuff about Ann Coulter.

Joe Conason was just the latest to exhaustively pick her newest book apart.

If you want, I'll give you link to his piece. Salon is doing this "Free Day Pass" thing and you have to endure a 30 second Flash commercial before you can read his piece, but it's worth the time, if you want to know the facts behind Coulter's book.

Let me know.

Dean:

Let me see if I have this right -- you want to spank Ann Coulter and you want to see Michael Moore in a bikini.

Did I get that right? Correct me if I'm wrong.

My take on it? Dowd is a satirist, Coulter is an ideologue. As is Moore. So there you go.

I'm just saying.

Yes I would like links, though I would say that Salon is already on my highly skeptical list. I'm interested in facts and will take them from any source(assuming that they can be verified).

Aaron:

On second thought, here is the link to Conason's article:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/07/04/treason/index_np.html

Don't forget to click on the "Free Day Pass" link to get full access to the whole article. You'll have to watch a short commercial but the article is worth it.

Also, here is the link to the Ann Coulter library at SpinSanity.com:

http://www.spinsanity.org/topics/#Coulter

and their current article about her new book:
http://spinsanity.org/columns/20030630.html

Ann Coulter is from that school of thought that says that the most important thing of all is to really really believe in what you are saying. And be very forceful in saying it.

To her, nothing else matters.

Go figure.

I'm way ahead of you and DoRo on this one:

[Coulter]'s gone from being a snarkier, conservative Maureen Dowd to being a pretty, conservative Paul Begala." OTB 6-19-03

And I got the same type of comments you're getting-almost verbatim :-)

Aaron:

Salon is already on my highly skeptical list. I'm interested in facts and will take them from any source(assuming that they can be verified).

[shrug] Suit yourself. I'd be interested in your take on the stuff I sent you.

Well from what I have read of her so far she adds a ton of hype and vehemence to what she writes about and using everything to attack liberals, which I find somewhat annoying. What I am looking are not cases of spin(which I know she does and is why I am midly skeptical of anything she writes), but gross factual errors, which if found would make me much more skeptical of her.

Aaron:

Keep reading.

Ara, yeah I posted that last comment before I read your with the links. I'm looking now.

The spinsanity column is about what I thought, though I admit that Coulter takes more liberty with quotes than I know about moving her further down on my skepticism meter.

Off to read what Salon has to say.

Well the Salon article does several of the things it accuses Coulter of doing, spinning and bending quotes to support their attacks, but it also raises a few issues that I will be looking further into.

They also refrence the "five factual claims that are indisputable false." from the spinsanity article, yet those are failry weak. The first one mentioned is just silly and has nothing to do with what she said. The second is something that can be taken a few different ways. The 3rd is valid. The 4th is a stretch, assigning distortion and malice to a statement that I took as being a bit toungue in cheek regarding the chairman's comment that the prize should be reguarded as a critisism of the Bush administration. (yes I am paraphrasing a lot here, readers not familiar with them please read the original articles and judge for yourselves.) The 5th also seems valid.

So my conclusion from what I have read so far is that there is some validity to comparing her to Dowd, in that she does take far too much liberty with quotes and sources. She is writing first and foremost to further her political agenda and secondly to report the facts. Though I think the articles written about her do the same it doesn't discredit their facts any more than her writing does her's.

So yes, you have conviced me to be pretty skeptical her, though she has madee some interesting points and brought up some interesting things.

At the center of Coulter's book Treason is Sen. Joe McCarthy. From everyting that I have read and understand about him Coulter is certainly painting him in the most positive light possible, which is in stark contrast to the more traditional villification of him.

While Coutler has used the story of McCarthy as a srouce to attack liberals in a manner that is not fair to liberals, I believe most of her accounting of him to be accurate, and I am curious what the rest of you think.

So what do you think of Sen. Joe McCarthy and the things he did?

You know you're in trouble when you're a conservative and both the WSJ and David Horowitz are taking out after you. See today's frontpagemag.com for Horowitz's view.

I too, am interested in a re-examination of McCarthy given more current knowledge and I'm dismayed at the messenger here which ends up requiring so much second-guessing ("Is this really accurate...")

Aaron,

There are people I know and respect, who were adults during the McCarthy era, who feel that without McCarthy we would now be living in a Communist country.

McCarthy was not a nice guy, and he was over the top in many respects, but his basic thesis was right on the money. There WERE commie spies. There were LOTS of commie spies. There were agents of the Soviet in the State Department. We know this NOW because we got to read the files of the KGB after the Soviet Union disintegrated.

Without Joe McCarthy, or someone like him, those agents would have acheived thier goal of subverting the US government.

It would have been better, of course, if McCarthy had been a saint, but the fact that he wasn't doesn't mean that he was the devil.

McCarthy's information may have been more accurate than portrayed (I don't know) but his methods were inexcusable, Stalinist, in fact. He was finally stopped by congresspeople on both sides of the aisle who were fed up with his smear campaigns and the climate of fear he fostered throughout the nation. He was a bad guy and should not be rehabilitated.

PS The campus intimidation tactics people decry here (per Dena's previous post on the Cal Poly case) are exactly the kinds of tactics McCarthy used. He attempted to impose politically correct speech on the entire nation, the only difference is that his politics were different.

Dean,

I'd like to spank Ann Coulter too. But not in a punitive fashion.

She's over the top, no question, but a lot of what she says is said with a wink, and I, for one, view her more as an entertainer than an authority.There are a lot more of these people on the left than on the right. Think James Carville, Paul Begala, even Al Franken and Bill Mahr.

If Ann Coulter was an isolated nutball, I would be less forgiving, but she is merely a point on the spectrum of opinion, and considerably less outrageous than many on the other side.

Bear in mind that this is how she makes her living. I'm confident that if she were less outrageous, she'd make less money. Being over the top is her stock in trade, rather than despising her for it, you should admire her panache and (dare I say it?) her balls.

Yehundit,

While McCarthy was a bad guy in my book (for being an unprincipled political grandstander) that doesn't excuse those who tacitly supported communism by providing political cover, or worse those who actually did take orders from the Soviets. I think Coulter screwed up royally by making McCarthy the focus rather than those he attacked, most of whom were indisputably communist supporters.

The McCarthy focus allows her opponents to paint her as an extremist and thus never have to defend their ideological predecessors to the 99.9% of Americans who will never read the book.

As an aside, Horowitz's article was excellent: by far the most complete, rational argument I've ever read of his. It's too bad he wastes his talent baiting idiodic college students.

It's long struck me that there were people like Kennedy and Nixon quite able to take on Communists without McCarthy going over the top.

As for Dowd's defense being that she is a satirist: she has never been an equal-opportunity offender even if she sometimes turned her guns on her own side. However, she's been so over-the-top nasty and just plain irresponsible, she long ago transcended satire and ventured into the realm of just paint-by-numbers shrewishness. The proper word for her is "polemicist."

She's not a particularly funny one, and definitely not a clever or witty one. Although I'm sure that Pulitzer she was issued with her desk at the New York Times makes her think she's still relevent somehow.

Yehundit,

I think that you have bought in more to the myth of McCarthy than the facts surrounding him. While he would certainly bully people inside of a hearing attempting to pull the truth out of them, thre is little to support his "fostering" a "climate of fear throughout the nation", unless you are referring to the fear that there really was a powerful soviet spy network at work in the US.

McCarthy's main goal was to prevent people who were questionable sercurity risks from having access to classified materials. With that goal in mind it was not necessary for him to prove someone was a spy or to prove they were disloyal. He was not attempting to arrest people and have them tried for treason or any other crime, instead he was attempting to have them removed from positions where they would have access to information that should not be accessed by people that posed a questionable security risk.

The assertion that someone is a questionable security risk is far different from the one that they are a traitor. Part of the anti-communism came from the fact that McCarthy believed that being a communist would make someone a security risk. I agree with that belief, and recent evedence has shown that McCarthy was right to be concerned.

David Horowitz's article on Ann Coulter's book Treason is good and raises some interesting points.

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=8793)

I certainly need to research more about McCarthy to get a clear picture of what happened. He is a very hard man to research, I've found that there is little factual information about him amongs a ton of opinions, rants, and outright propaganda(both for and against).

Horiwitz makes the case that McCarthy was nearly irellivent and partially damaging to the cause of rooting out soviet agents. That brings the question of really which agents were identified by who, when and why. If anyone has some good sources for this I would like to hear of them. I'm trying to trak it down myself, but finding it a difficult topic to research.

In any case I think that McCarthy was far from a saint, but far from the demon that some would portray him as. There is so much myth, distortion, and outright falsehoods surrounding him and the entire issue of communism and spies in American in the 40s and 50s that it is very difficult to really know what happened.

I'm glad that the issues have been raised in Ann's book however, because I would like to see the truth behind the whole "McCarthyism" myth exposed and many people are starting to research and write about the issue.

Dean, I'd like to spank her just on general principals! Heh heh heh...

I must say you did blow on thing, though: Rush Limbaugh is the Michael Moore of the right,not Coulter.

I sometimes wondered if Ann Coulter was writing to a niche market when she penned “Slander.” I thought then that she reached the limit of satirical liberal bashing when penning that book. I read it and found “Slander” over documented. However, I gave her the benefit of the doubt believing that if her book contained less than 714 liberals might opine that she did not provide “proof” supporting her arguments.

But I wondered whether Ann Coulter would ever go over the top criticizing the left. I have not read the book yet, and I certainly do not trust any liberal interpretation of her book. But some scholarship certainly appears debunking Coulter. I wonder if anybody actually makes any money in this cottage industry. I enjoyed a correspondence with Ara Rubyan after Ann’s last book. I was more under whelmed by the scholarship-criticizing Coulter than he was. I found it rather weak.

I understand in her recent book “Treason” that she gives no quarter to any Democrat, not even John F. Kennedy. Anne evasively answered Chris Matthews when he asked her whether Kennedy was a traitor. I did not find this heartening from the straight-talking conservative.

I do believe that she did part some useful information. Joseph Welch is outed as a fraud. McCarthy’s forgotten claim of Owen Lattimore’s communist sympathies in the state department is vindicated. Alger Hiss stated in “Witness” that the Army moved its testing from Maryland’s Aberdeen proving grounds in the 1940’s to Fort Huachuca, AZ was done very sotto voce for fear of reigniting and vindicating Senator Joe McCarthy’s claims. This move occurred only a few short months after the Army-McCarthy hearings ended.

Has she gone over the top? I will the book and find out. Perhaps she mixed her Coultian satire with history. This by itself will provide juice for many criticisms by itself. I will also enjoy reading some criticisms of her book, too. If they are as bad as last time, they will certainly be weaker than Ann Coulter’s argument.

The problem with Coulter is that she comes across like Begala and Carville. She spins the facts to present them in a better light for her, but she uses facts. Something Begala and Carville surely don't. The main problem with her is that there isn't a sympathetic press to act as if she is right.
As for McCarthy, as somebody once said,"What do you call a witch-hunt that finds witches?"
Say what you want about him, and it is hard to get facts, but he was right about the influence of the Soviets in the government. Most of the attacks act as if he was chasing shadows.