I just finished Ann Coulter's "Treason." For those of you who don't know, Ann Coulter is sort of the token woman of the right wing here in the United States. Unlike most tokens, however, she doesn't die in the first scene and has, instead, taken to writing books.
Where to begin... Well, if Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival" was guilty of being poorly argued left wing teleology disguised as serious academic writing, Treason is an undisguised Neo-Conservative masturbation piece that might bring Rush Limbaugh to climax during a reading by, say, Nancy Reagan.
The premise of Treason is simple: The left wing in the United States is almost always guilty of coming down on the wrong side of National Security issues, and, by extension, are unpatriotic, treasonist gits. I say "almost always" because she has to make grudging exception for Truman, who dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. However, she doesn't like him either and insists that he weak on communism. But more about that later. She takes Disraeli's comment about Liberals being friends of every country save their own, expands it, wraps herself in it like a nice warm blanket of groupthink and smothers any hint of nuance or thought.
Rife with generalized ad hominem attacks - too numerous to list - on the political left wing of the United States, the Media, Franklin Roosevelt and anybody else that she happened not to like that day, half the book is devoted to trying to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy, who, she argues, was right about there being Communists in the U.S. government and so, anything else he did was just fine. In essence, the ends justify the means.
The book is so bad, so one sided, that there is nothing to argue about. Assertions are made without hint of evidence. Evidence she does use is skewed and manipulated to ensure that her point is made: If you are the only famous female neo-Con in the United States, you can get anything published.
No. Wait. That's not it.
Actually, she and Noam Chomsky share the nasty habit of ignoring or skewing, vice attempting to explain, evidence that does NOT support their theses. Where Noam used ITALY as his example to show how nationalism is considered a cute, anachronistic force by "modern, evolved" societies, Coulter attempted to back up the idea that Democrats (who are apparently synonymous with Stalinists--a classic equivalency fallacy) always make mistakes by casting the Cuban Missile Crisis as a huge strategic DEFEAT for the United States.
Let me explain the Cuban Missile Crisis in a nutshell. The U.S. found out the USSR was putting nuclear capable missiles in Cuba. Understandably, the U.S. was annoyed and viewed this as a serious threat to U.S. security. Perfectly reasonable. The Kennedy admin made public accusations and demanded their removal. The USSR played stupid and said they weren't there. Rhetorical escalation ensued, forces were deployed in different areas and DEFCON went up. There was some angriness between Sov and U.S. Naval forces.
It was probably the closest the world came to nuclear winter.
In the end, the U.S. presented smoking gun evidence that the USSR WAS putting nukes in Cuba. In a solution that allowed the Soviets to save face, Kennedy agreed to remove the Hercules (I think they were called) nukes from Turkey that were aimed at the Soviet Union, in exchange for the Cuban nukes to go away. The Sovs accepted the arrangement.
Sounds like Tit for Tat, right? Coulter argues that this was a failure because a "Republican administration never would have allowed things to get this far," (Huh? How is this supportable?!!!!) and that removing missiles from Turkey represented a serious weakening of U.S. security. (cont.)
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