SULLY ON COULTER

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SULLY ON COULTER

James Joyner | Saturday, July 26, 2003

Andrew Sullivan retorts to the San Tenenhaus piece on Ann Coulter (which I blogged Thursday) quite well:

The difference between us and Coulter is that we want to make distinctions and she doesn’t. So in today’s Democratic Party, it’s vital to distinguish between the well-intentioned critiques of Howard Dean or John Kerry or Bob Graham and those crackpot Democratic activists on Democratic Underground or openly treasonous Columbia University professors who really do want to see the U.S. defeated in Iraq. This strikes me as a pretty critical distinction. My beef with many Democrats right now is not that they’re traitors of any kind but that they have got their perspective skewed; and they need to realize more strongly that we really are fighting truly bad guys out there and our president isn’t one of them. How weird that Tanenhaus should should somehow fail to see this distinction and paint diverse and serious writers like Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Horowitz as indistinguishable from Coulter. Isn’t that kind of broad brush exactly what Coulter is criticized for?

Indeed.

Sully’s sidebar links his July 6 piece in the Sunday Times, which also criticizes Coulter. This snippet is quite insightful:

In the ever-competitive marketplace of political ideas – in a world of blogs and talk radio and cable news – it’s increasingly hard to stand out. Coulter’s answer to that dilemma is two-fold: look amazing and ratchet up the rhetoric against the left until it has the subtlety and nuance of a car alarm. The left, in turn, has learned the lesson, which is why the fraud and dissembler, Michael Moore, has done so well. In fact, it’s worth thinking of Coulter as a kind of inverse Moore: where’s he’s ugly and ill-kempt, she’s glamorous and impeccably turned out. (Her web-page, AnnCoulter.org, has a gallery of sexy images.) But what they have in common is more significant: an hysterical hatred of their political opponents and an ability to say anything to advance their causes (and extremely lucrative careers).

The rest is worth a read.

About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.

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