Well, maybe “moron” isn’t correct. Maybe she’s intelligent enough to know how to get people to believe things that are patently false. She could just be evil, I suppose. A liar and party hack who has no integrity, and is willing to pass on party lies to sway public opinion.
The latest example of this is one of her latest columns, via yahoo.com. Coulter gets off to a bad start, with not one but two lies right out of the gates:
As we now know, Saddam Hussein was working with al-Qaida and was trying to acquire long-range missiles from North Korea and enriched uranium from Niger.
We actually know the exact opposite of this: we now know that Saddam was not working with al-Quaeda, and that Saddam was not trying to get enriched uranium from Niger. That Coulter tries to pass off these lies as fact is both pathetic and scary, because there are people who will believe what she writes.
But then Coulter goes on to fictionalize the vote that took place in the House of Representatives regarding a resolution to immediately withdraw troops from Iraq:
Fed up with being endlessly told “the American people” have turned against the war in Iraq, Republicans asked the Democrats to show what they had in their hand and vote on a resolution to withdraw the troops.
By a vote of 403-3, the House of Representatives wasn’t willing to bet that “the American people” want to pull out of Iraq. (This vote also marked the first time in recent history that the Democrats did not respond to getting their butts kicked by demanding a recount.)
You’ll notice that Coulter leaves out the “immediately” part of the resolution. Which is unfair, because that is the crux of the resolution and the resulting vote. There is no way that we could immediately leave Iraq. We have to do a phased withdrawal of troops. So there was no way that Congresspeople – Democrat or Republican – were going to vote in favor of this. (I’m actually surprised the vote wasn’t unanimous.) This was a sham of a resolution, called specifically to try to embarrass House Democrats.
Coulter wasn’t finished there, however. She then goes on to try to declare anti-war protests unAmerican and treasonous:
Anti-war protests in the U.S. during the Vietnam War were a major source of moral support to the enemy. We know that not only from plain common sense, but from the statements of former North Vietnamese military leaders who evidently didn’t get the memo telling them not to say so. In an Aug. 3, 1995, interview in The Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, called the American peace movement “essential” to the North Vietnamese victory.
“Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement,” he said. “Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.”
Coulter seems to ignore the fact completely that the anti-war movement is what led to the end of the Vietnam war, saving untold thousands of lives. And I don’t buy her argument, nor her “source” for a minute. The enemy was fighting because foreigners hard invaded their home lands. They were not going to give up for any reason short of our withdrawal. And the same thing is true of the Iraqi insurgents.
Coulter finishes up her article with a rather boring tactic that’s been used for far too long by conservatives: calling anyone who would dare to exercise their right to free speech “traitors.”
They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors.
Well, I guess that, if you can’t match up intellectually or truthfully with someone, calling them names is the next best thing to do?
Anyway, that leaves us with one very important question: why did I bother to rebut an Ann Coulter column? What can I say? I’m stuck at work and I am very bored. It was either do this, or take the trash out.