posted June 22, 2006 07:08 PM            

I love how when I make sweeping claims about the right I get all kinds of response outta you two, but when I make objective statements about both sides I don't even get the bat of an eye. Jwhop I'm not going to try to prove global warming to you, if you live long enough, you will see its effects, mother nature will prove it to you. Leftists can be schizophrenic, so can anyone on either side.

Pid that was a great post, I really appreciate your clarification. Abortion is a tough issue, based on my knowledge, killing a 2nd or 3rd trimester fetus is pretty disgusting, and I'm sure very few are in favor of abortions. But do you know what I am in favor of, and anyone with old fashioned conservative values should be? LESS gov't interference.

I dont' think its the gov'ts right to tell women what they can do with their bodies. This is not a religious gov't, this is a secular gov't, I think that many republicans often forget this fact. What happened to the republican party? Why such big government now? They want to affect every little way we run our lives. I dont 'understand, Jwhop and PIduau, how you can admire our current presidential cabinet, when MUCH of what they do goes against traditional conservative values. All I see is spend spend spend, interference. Unlike you, Jwhop, I don't blindly follow along Partisan lines, and in fact i've voted for candidates of many parties.

posted June 22, 2006 07:15 PM            

Ann Coulter spoke with Neil Cavuto today on his "Your World" program, and covered topics from the economy to elections to why liberals hate her, but she came out swinging right away when asked about John Kerry's proposal to set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

"I just love that [Democrats] each have a different time for when we pull the troops out ... I think they ought to start doing it like American Idol and just start taking requests for what the deadline will be."

She added later, "Can you imagine FDR having to deal with this during WWII? 'What's our schedule? When do we pull out? Can we have a timeline? What's your plan?' Ugh."

Cavuto countered they the Democrats see a method to setting a deadline because they think Americans are sick of the battles in Iraq, to which Coulter quipped, "If it's so obvious that we need a timeline, why can't they decide? Kerry said the end of the year, some other Democrat next July ... it's obviously completely random. That's why they should do it like American Idol."

Cavuto told Coulter that Democrats were annoyed with Kerry for trying to use a losing proposal to move the party to an extreme position. Coulter agreed that Kerry was annoying, and said that it proved Republicans were smarter than Democrats because "We've been annoyed with Kerry for years."

One Democrat who doesn't annoy Coulter is Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who Coulter said she admired because he wants to protect the United States and fight the war on terrorism.

She said he wouldn't be the best Republican, but that he should skip running as a third party candidate and "come all the way and become a Republican ... at least he'd fit in with the party that wants to defend the country."

Some other Coulter quotables:

Democrats "may as well completely change the name of their party if they can't win in the fall election. It's preposterous that they would lose a second time during mid-term elections. This has to be their year. It oughtta be their '94 Gingrich revolution ... they should pick up 60 seats in the House and a dozen in the Senate - but they're so insane that may not happen."

"It hurts me when I write a column and I don't get Liberals hysterical and foaming at the mouth ... that is their natural reaction ... Whittaker Chambers said, 'People never get upset when lies are told about them they get upset when truth is told.'"

Liberals "suddenly elevate what they think of Reagan in order to attack Bush. They never said anything nice about Reagan at the time. They were completely hysterical during the Reagan presidency; he was an idiot [to them]."

posted June 22, 2006 08:10 PM            

Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it's been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn't that great?" and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer.

But nobody's talking too much about the finer points of Miss Coulter's argument. Instead, everyone -- from Hillary Rodham Clinton down -- is going bananas about a couple of paragraphs on page 103 and 112 in which the author savages the 9/11 widows. Not all of them. Just the quartet led by Kristen Breitweiser and known as "the Jersey Girls." These four widows have been regular fixtures in the New York TV studios since they first emerged to complain that the average $1.6 million-per-family compensation was insufficient. The 9/11 commission, in all its ghastly second-guessing showboating, was largely their project. As Miss Coulter writes:

"These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much."

And at that point Senator Clinton jumped in to denounce the incendiary blond commentatrix as (dread word) "mean-spirited." Maybe so. But in 2004, the Jersey Girls publicly endorsed John Kerry's campaign for president: they inserted themselves into the political arena and chose sides. That being so, to demand that they be insulated from the normal rough 'n' tumble of partisan politics merely because of their biography seems absurd. There are any number of 9/11 widows. A few are big George W. Bush supporters, many are apolitical. I was honoured to receive an email the other day from Deena Gilbey, a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center and remained in the building to help evacuate his colleagues. A few days later, U.S. Immigration sent Mrs. Gilbey a letter informing her that, as she was now a widow, her residence status had changed and they were enclosing a deportation order. Having legally admitted to the country the men who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act after having enabled his murder is to further traumatize the bereaved.

The heartless brain-dead bonehead penpusher who sent out that letter is far more "mean-spirited" than Miss Coulter at full throttle. Yet Mrs. Gilbey isn't courted by the TV bookers the way the Jersey Girls are. Hundreds of soldiers' moms believe their sons died in a noble and just cause in Iraq, but it's Cindy Sheehan, who calls Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world," who gets speaking engagements across America, Canada, Britain, Europe and Australia. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi winds up pushing up daisy cutters, the media don't go to Paul Bigley, who rejoiced that the man who decapitated his brother would now "rot in hell," nor the splendid Aussie Douglas Wood, who called his kidnappers "arseholes," nor his fellow hostage Ulf Hjertstrom, a Swede who's invested 50,000 bucks or so in trying to track down the men who kidnapped him and visit a little reciprocal justice on them. No, instead, the media rush to get the reaction of Michael Berg, who thinks Bush is "the real terrorist" rather than the man who beheaded his son.

But it wasn't until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry's pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush's Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he's still down there. It's gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can't attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you've got most of your arms and legs and he hasn't. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn't have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry's speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, "If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards."

"What crackpot argument can't be immunized by the Left's invocation of infallibility based on personal experience?" wonders Miss Coulter of Cleland, Sheehan, the Jersey Girls and Co. "If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we're allowed to respond to?"

Now that's a point worth making. As it is, thanks to Coulter cracks like "Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy," even chaps on the right are doing the more-in-sorrow shtick and saying that they've been making the same basic argument as Ann and it's such a shame she had to go too far with her cheap shots because that's discredited the entire argument, etc.

The trouble with this line is that hardly anyone was objecting to the professional widow routine pre-Coulter. Well, that's not strictly true. Yours truly objected. After the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, I wrote:

"The first reaction of the news shows to the verdict was to book some relative of the 9/11 families and ask whether they were satisfied with the result, as if the prosecution of the war on terror is some kind of national-security Megan's Law on which they have inviolable proprietorial rights. Sorry, but that's not what happened that Tuesday morning. The thousands who died were not targeted as individuals: they were killed because they were American, not because somebody in a cave far away decided to murder Mrs. Smith. . . It's not about 'closure' for the victims; it's about victory for the nation."

But nobody paid the slightest heed to this line. For all the impact my column had, I might as well have done house calls. Then Coulter comes in and yuks it up with the Playboy-spread gags, and suddenly the Jersey Girls only want to do the super-extra-fluffy puffball interviews. So two paragraphs in Ann Coulter's book have succeeded in repositioning these ladies: they may still be effective Democrat hackettes, but I think TV shows will have a harder time passing them off as non-partisan representatives of the 9/11 dead.

posted June 22, 2006 10:16 PM              

People against war and kiling are wrong...they're just fools.

posted June 22, 2006 10:25 PM              

Wheres my karma...when will I get what I sow?

posted June 25, 2006 06:47 PM            

When leftists start caterwauling about civility, it reminds me of when my kids were young.

When my daughter Anna was 5 and my son, Jonathan was 4, World War III broke out in our household at least once a day. Anna’s modus operandi, as she explained it to her grandfather, was: "I hit Jonathan. He hits me. Then I tell Mommy."

In essence, that’s the leftists’ civility scam: They hit us. We hit back. Then their media lap dogs begin howling about incivility and yapping about the decline of gentility in the political debate (which, if I’m not mistaken, started with the presidential election of 1800).

It comes on cue; Ann Coulter writes a book and liberals start spewing about mean-spiritedness.

In her latest foray (Godless: The Church of Liberalism), Coulter observed that the "Jersey Girls" – four 9/11 widows who turned themselves into tools of the hate-Bush establishment – reveled in their celebrity status. OK, she called them "harpies" too.

Low blow! the media referees of political pugilism cried. (These self-appointed refs always seem to be gazing off into space when left-wingers rabbit-punch conservatives, or deliver a debilitating kick to the groin.)

Conservative obnoxiousness is a marketing device, the pundits explain. Coulter does it to sell books. Rush Limbaugh does it to boost his ratings.

"There’s something about the momentum of sustaining a reputation based on noise," sniffs Roger Rosenblatt, "culture critic" for Time Magazine (whose idea of intellectual colloquy is eye-gouging anyone to the right of Mother Blood). Rosenblatt explains, "Someone like Coulter, in order to sustain a reputation that she’s forged for herself, is likely to think, ‘What can I say now?’ Eventually, how insulting can you get?"

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former enabler-in-chief who spent most of her married life plotting to destroy the reputations of women who accused her predator-husband, ran to give the Jersey Girls a big hug. "Perhaps her (Coulter’s) book should have been called ‘Heartless,’" the lady widely known for her warmth and humanity sneered.

But Coulter’s comments about the Jersey Girls weren’t gratuitous. She devoted a chapter in her book to the way the left picks spokesmen whose suffering is supposed to immunize them from criticism -- Cindy Sheehan, Nick Berg’s father, Christopher Reeve, the Jersey Girls, etc. When we respond to their crackpot carping, we’re admonished for our stunning insensitivity.

Meanwhile, the left has perfected the gentle art of character assassination, while complaining about the politics of personal destruction. Their idea of a civilized dialogue is calling us really-mean Nazis, while our mouths are taped shut.

The quintessence of liberal civility is the thoughtful fashion in which the left expresses its disagreement with the policies of George W. Bush.

When a liberal writes a book about the 43rd. president of the United States, the words "lies," "liar," "stupid" or "evil" must appear in the title. The trifecta of liberal Bush-bashing would be a book titled "The Evil Lies of Stupid Bush" (or, "The Stupid Lies of Evil Bush").

Illustrative of the liar-liar-pants-on-fire school of liberal analysis, here are just a few of the titles offered on Amazon.com:

The Lies of George Bush by David Corn
Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn’t Tell You by Paul Waldman
Big Bush Lies: The 20 Most Telling Lies of President George W. Bush by Jerry Politex
The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq by Christopher Scheer, Lakshmi Chaudhry, and Robert Scheer
Bush Lies In State by Michael McCourt; and
Aliens And Cowboys: Bush’s Legacy of Lies by Jefferson Lang.
Coming soon to a bookstore near you, Neener-Neener/ I-Know-You-Are-But-What-Am-I? -- The Intelligent Liberal’s Guide To Political Discourse by Franken Rodham Moore.

Or, consider the way leftists routinely demonize their opponents:

Evangelical Christians – Ignorant, superstitious, violence-prone fanatics intent on establishing a theocracy and putting homosexuals, abortionists, pornographers, feminists, Moslems, and Ron Howard in death camps.

Gun Owners – Homicidal maniacs who want to arm toddlers with howitzers and kill Bambi.

The U.S. Military – Stone-cold killers, Lt. Calley-clones programmed to indiscriminately murder women and children and torture detainees.

Pro-lifers – Religious fanatics, misogynists who want to turn women into breeding stock, violence-prone fetus-worshippers who care about life only in the womb.

Immigration Reform Advocates – Xenophobes who are betraying America’s nation-of-immigrants heritage and have an irrational fear of diversity as well as anyone named Juan or Jose.

Politicians Who Support the U.S. Presence in Iraq, but either A) Didn’t serve in the military, B) Served, but didn’t see combat or C) Served, saw combat, but failed to win the Medal of Honor – Chicken Hawks, nancy boys, hypocritical jingoists who’ll defend America to the last drop of the other guy’s blood.

In academia, where leftists are demigods, the dialogue has reached heights of elegance and refinement worthy of a Victorian drawing room.

Take Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who called the Americans who died in the World Trade Center "little Eichmanns" responsible for America’s "mighty engine of profit," while their killers were heroes who made "gallant sacrifices" to strike a blow against the American Reich.

Can Roger Rosenblatt be reached for comment? I don’t recall Senator Clinton condemning Churchill’s comments as "heartless."

Besides the fact that she loves America and doesn’t sound like a raving lunatic, here are the essential differences between Coulter and Churchill: 1) Coulter isn’t paid by Colorado taxpayers; 2) Students aren’t forced to sit in a classroom and listen to her. (Actually, no one is forced to listen to her); and 3) Professors aren’t getting all weepy while defending her academic freedom.

Admittedly, conservatives give as good as they get. The difference between us and them is that we can argue as well as inveigh. They can only hurl invectives.

In her new book, Coulter is caustic and cutting. She also makes a devastating case against lieft-wing crime-control policies (the ultimate oxymoron), abortion, stem-cell research, global warming, evolutionism, and public education.

Leftists can’t argue because – 1) Their positions are illogical and indefensible; 2) They’ve controlled the culture for so long that they’ve lost any debating skills they once had (their mental muscles have atrophied); and 3) Since they consider opposition to their agenda by definition evil, they think it’s beneath their dignity to debate us.

That’s why leftists can’t succeed at talk radio – that, plus the fact that they’re humor-deficient. I may not always agree with Rush, but he’s an articulate, persuasive advocate. As a talk show host, Al Franken (author of the carefully nuanced book Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot) is a great – whatever it is he’s supposed to be.

Because left-wingers can’t debate, they are forever telling us that on certain issues "the debate is closed" – words I’ve never heard from a conservative.

That and demanding that their viewpoint be subsidized. Speaking at the "Take Back America" conference on June 15 (these days, the left is always taking something back), Rep. Bernie Sanders (VP – Vanguard of the Proletariat – Vermont), urged his fellow progressives to take on "right-wing nuts" (how’s that for civility?) in talk radio – perhaps Sanders should teach them how to dial a telephone – and demand that conservative stations and newspapers provide "alternative points of view."

Apparently, controlling the networks (with the exception of FOX), America’s newspapers of record, Hollywood, public education and the liberal arts faculties of 99.9 percent of colleges and universities isn’t enough. Sanders wants to force conservative media outlets to subsidize the opposition. ("Mommy, Rush has a weekly audience of 20 million. Make them give me my own talk show!")

Coulter’s book now is #1 on The New York Times Best Sellers List. Clearly, we need a government program to force book-buyers to purchase left-wing tracts.

As a survival skill in the political arena lieftists shaped, conservatives have learned verbal street-fighting. But at least we’re not hypocrites. We don’t sucker-punch the other guy and then start whining about the appalling lack of civility when he hits back.

posted June 26, 2006 12:33 PM            

Ah, those now famous 28 words. Forget about the once famous "16 words." Ann Coulter has uttered 28 words (not based upon false intelligence) that are all the rage:

''These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.''
Of course, she was talking about the Dixie Chicks. No, that would be false intelligence. Ann was talking about none other than the Jersey Girls! As you may recall, the Jersey Girls are a group of September 11 widows who blamed President Bush for the attacks that killed their husbands, appeared in political commercials and who campaigned for John Kerry in 2004.

Ann got her facts right with those 28 words and that's what really stung liberals like Hillary Clinton. Hillary, inexplicably a candidate for president in 2008, responded to Ann's comments by calling Ann ''vicious [and] mean-spirited'' toward a group of clearly politically active September 11 widows.

Whoa! ''Mean-spirited.'' Isn't that what Democrats called the universally loved Bob Dole?

Hillary continued: ''Perhaps [Coulter's] book should have been called 'Heartless.' I know a lot of the widows and family members who lost loved ones on September 11. They never wanted to be a member of a group that is defined by the tragedy of what happened.''

''Heartless?'' This comes from the woman who pulled out all the stops to ruin Billy Dale's life all because she wanted her Arkansas cronies to run the White House Travel Office.

And then Ann, according to liberals anyway, really stepped in it:

''I think if she's worried about people being mean to women, she should have a talk with her husband,'' Coulter told a radio host who was hosting a book signing for the mean-spirited Ann Coulter. ''This is, I remind you, Bill Clinton's wife,'' Coulter added. ''And I'm the one who's mean to women? She may know the September 11 widows, but I know Juanita Broaddrick'' - a reference to a woman who claims she was raped by then attorney general for the great state of Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton.

Not only do I have no problem whatsoever with anything Ann Coulter said about the Jersey Girls, I don't think she went far enough in her response to Hillary Clinton about how mean her husband has been to women he once wanted to have sex with. He must have liked them a bunch!

Ann, probably because she's just a petite feminine softy, really should have brought up the Barrett Report. The Barrett Report reveals that several women the President found to be sexually stimulating were audited by the Clintons' IRS. Yep, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Elizabeth Ward Gracen and Juanita Broaddrick were targeted by audits during the 1990s.

Ann may be considered insensitive by some, but auditing women your husband either assaulted, abused or had sex with is criminal. Nixon never did anything like this.

Where were Woodward and Bernstein on this one?

To me, this is a key issue if Hillary is to move forward as a candidate for president. Her husband needs to explain: Exactly what did the Barrett Report conclude and do you dispute the findings? I haven't heard the audits of these three women are in dispute. By the way, it is far more likely that I will win the lottery than all three women getting an IRS audit.

And Democrats talk about a ''culture of corruption?'' They worry about an NSA program that monitors phone calls from known terrorists living overseas and making calls to our country in a time of war? They'll expose a banking system that helps weed out terrorist payment but not this incredible abuse of power.

Are you kidding me?

Ann Coulter's whole point was that Democrats shield their opinions from scrutiny. They always manage to find a victim to hide behind. The Jersey Girls have their husbands who were killed on September 11. Jack ''I'm the crazy uncle in the basement'' Murtha has his Purple Heart and service in Vietnam to shield him from simple questions about his cut and run strategy. Ditto John Kerry. Cindy Sheehan has her son who was killed in action and that shields her, too, from questions about her incoherent rants and desperate love for the spotlight. And Hillary has Bill – the disbarred, impeached, recklessly pardoning, Lincoln bedroom selling hero of the left, as her shield.

If not for Bill Clinton, Hillary would be treated by fellow Democrats the same way they treat Joe Lieberman – like a piece of rotting trash. But even with Bill as a shield, we should discover the facts about the auditing of Bill's enemies — not limited to, but including, women who made the terrible mistake of appealing to Bill's wide-ranging and seemingly insatiable desires.

If Ann Coulter was as unbalanced and vicious as liberals contend, you'd think liberals would encourage everyone to read her book. Seems to me liberals are spewing their venom in hopes of poisoning the well. They do not want Ann's book in anyone's hands.

Ann stands tall without a shield of any kind. She arms herself with only facts, wit and reason.