Ann Coulter not loved by righties??

In looking for other information this morning I tripped over this review of “Treason” at a conservative website known as The Claremont Institute. It is written by superciliously, imperious author William F. Buckley no less. I was expecting laudatory praise and instead find that Mr. Buckley doesn’t consider Annie that hot, her rhetoric I mean.

Although he tries to pander to his readership in the last sentence when he states,
“There is a lot of such fun and shrewdness as this in Ann Coulter's book, but there is also mischief, which of course can be fun. Especially mischief about the other guy.” I have to give him the benefit of the doubt that his editor made him say that after a rather critical review. Here are some excerpts. The bold words are mine. I thought he was hiding some disdain for Coulter in these phrases.

http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/winter2003/wfb.html

“But all of that is by the way in an inquiry into the Coulter thinking machine, which is my mission. What she wrote was that 1) the publisher of the newspaper that 2) printed an editorial that 3) reiterated the old historical argument that denounced U.S. acquiescence in the removal of Allende, was 4) engaging moral equivalence and therefore, 5) a traitor. We don't need to come up with the weaknesses, or even the depravities, in the Times's reasoning. But even as Ms. Coulter clearly intends to shock, why shouldn't her reader register that shock? By wondering whether she is out of her mind, or has simply lost her grip on language.”

“But as one reads along, one gets used to exaggerations—not McCarthy's, but Coulter's. She is carried away. Yes, the Rosenbergs were justly and correctly executed for treason, but get a load of the language that flows from it, in the hands of Ms. Coulter. She is talking about the famous Army-McCarthy contest and focusing now on the army dentist. The McCarthy committee spotted Major Irving Peress, a Communist, who had been kept on in the army and even promoted. "When were they to learn? Thanks to the Army's incompetence in dealing with the Rosenbergs, nearly 300 million Americans would spend the second half of the 20th century under threat of nuclear annihilation." That is something of a stretch, for-want-of-a-nail compounded to the 10th power. The Coulter reader, impelled by the momentum of Coulter, Historian, might wonder why, in high pitch of wrath and anger, she let the army off merely with the charge of incompetence. Why not make the army traitorous, too?”

“Arthur Herman's Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, published in 1999, sought to be balanced. Coulter goes in the opposite direction, sounding sometimes like Roy Cohn, whose defenses of McCarthy were in the language of biblical inerrancy: "If he said it (did it), it was the right thing to say (to do)." But as we have seen, Coulter is much, much more extreme in her judgments than McCarthy ever was, though from one particular passage of McCarthy she takes explicit encouragement, ending up on the road to Pinch-as-traitor.”


So couched between Buckley’s take on history and faint praise there are some really severe attacks on her position. He also injects some praise about her "wit", but that's because he's Buckley. It seems Anthrax Annie’s star is beginning to fade, even in her camp, where the neo-cons are slowly coming to the same conclusion that most DU’ers did a long time ago that Ann Coulter is crazy!

says he's a funny guy too

Buckley is an old, old conservative. He probably can't stomach this Coulter garbage, but he can't come out and say so any more than he already did in that review.

She's just a whore. Just like Hannity without a Martian sidekick.

n/t

While Buckley's views are often as repugnant as Coulter's, at least he's capable of stating them in an intelligent, somewhat rational manner, and can do so without going for inflammatory insults like calling all liberals "slanderous traitors" or suggesting we be executed.

And the fact that she gets tons of airtime from the right wing media while he, a seasoned right wing "intellectual" gets very little, has to be annoying to him. I know it is to me. Hell, I'd rather watch 6 straight hours of Buckley or George Will than 10 minutes of Ann The Man, even though I rarely agree with any of the above.

nt

not the rest of the crew.

Buckley can seem like an arrogant prick, but he's always had a sense of humor about it all. When he had his TV show, he was always laughing it up with his liberal regulars, and I suspect they went out for a few beers after the show. They actually seemed to like each other, and were in it for the fun of the debate. They regularly insulted each other, but the way friends do.

Buckley's old-school, and while he won't tolerate fools, he respects the other side when they have decent arguments.

If we gotta have conservatives, please make it more Buckleys.

Oh, btw, he came out for legalizing pot years ago. A libertarian thing.

and get drunk, then write insults to liberals, put them
in empty bottles and toss them back at the beach.

There is a link between psychosis and nicotine, its all that keeping her from going over the edge.