Call Her Names: Coulter's Affrontery in Perspective

Don't like what Ann Coulter said? ...or just how she says it?

Try the reviews:

"The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face," snarled one, ominously comparing it to a work of the Ku Klux Klan. "This fascist thesis," angrily spluttered another, "...This...pure fascism....What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for...?" Still others piled on. The book was dismissed as a series of "fanatically emotional attacks" that "succeeded in turning the stomachs of its readers." The author drew howls of outrage, the lesser of which focused on adjectives like "rude" and "obnoxious" before descending into cries of "fascist."

The name of the book was not Godless. And the author was not Ann Coulter. The book that drew such ferocious attention was God and Man at Yale. The author, a recent Yale graduate, was a precocious William F. Buckley, Jr.

...As with Coulter (and many others -- think of talkers/writers Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, culture maven David Horowitz, and more), in every single instance their words and actions are met with some firestorm of name-calling, verbal abuse, attempts at censorship and worse. While these furies take different forms, they have exactly the same end goal: to so discredit both message and messenger that they will never again be allowed to exist in polite society again.

The retired Archbishop of Milwaukee, a notorious "liberal" at least confined most of his public remarks to one adjective: "Divisive," when attempting to excoriate those who questioned the liberal agenda.

And the commentator (Jeffrey Lord) who wrote this article identifies the operational "strategy" most utilized by the Left; lacking in intellectually-compelling argumentation, they have nothing left to do but call names, although in some cases they blatantly lie (e.g., the Dan Rather technique, which echoed Dan Schorr's (CBS) lie about Goldwater:

CBS News solemnly reported the week of his nomination that Goldwater's first act after the convention would be to travel to Germany for a visit to "Berchtesgaden, Hitler's one-time stamping ground." And what will the conservative Goldwater do once there? "There are signs," CBS reporter Daniel Schorr said ominously, "that the American and German right wings are joining up..." Got that? Barry Goldwater, said CBS in so many words, was really a Nazi. With a presidential nomination in hand, he was literally heading to Hitler's home to get the international Nazi movement rolling. The story, from the trip to Germany to the visit to Hitler's estate was, of course, false from beginning to end.

Nothing new under the sun.

Daniel Moynihan is rolling in his grave.