Shocking as it may seem, Ann Coulter advances some rather dubious claims in her latest column without offering any corroborating evidence. While the article is Pit-worthy material, I’d like to know what the factual basis is for particular statements of hers:
[ul]
[li]“In Colorado, they [the Democratic party] traded voter registrations for crack cocaine”[/li][li]They [again, the Democrats] had liberal thugs ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters, stealing Bush-Cheney signs and slashing the tires of Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day."[/li][li]“Seventy percent to 80 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage and partial-birth abortion.”[/li][li]“opposition to gay marriage is strongest among the Democratic base: blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly.”[/li][/ul]She doesn’t cite any sources for these statistics or statements.
In addition, I question her insinuation that the Democratic party is responsible for manipulating the exit polls to show a Kerry advantage. I also take issue with her description of “false news reports that hundreds of tons of munitions had been looted in Iraq”–since I thought it was accepted that al-Qaqaa was indeed looted at some point, and that the only question was whether this happened before or after the invasion.
What evidence does Coulter have to back up any of her claims? Every search I’ve tried gets me lots of Free Republic and Washington Times-type articles, but I’m interested in less partisan sources–unless Coulter has completely pulled these statements out of her butt. However, I suspect that, as usual, she’s taken something with some grain of factual grounding and spun it beyond recognition; I’d like to know what these grains originally were.
True, but disingenuous.
There were several widely reported breakins at campaign offices around the country. In most cases laptops with “confidential campaign information” were stolen. Both republican and democrat offices were victimized.
True, but even more disingenuous.
This kind of stuff happens in most elections, from local to national races.
True and only a little disingenuous.
This was also pretty widely reported. Bush/Cheney campaign workers in one of the swing states (Ohio? Wisconsin?) had rented 30+ vans to help voters get to the polls. The vans were parked around a Bush/Cheney campaign office. On the morning of the election workers arrived to find one or more tires had been slashed on every van. Officially, the police have no suspects. It could have been a random act of vandalism, though suspecting political rivals is not a bad guess.
A Pew research poll from August 2004 shows that overall, the favor/oppose percentages for same sex marriages are 29/60, and for civil unions are 49/44. Blacks seem to be more opposed to SSM and CU (21/64 and 34/50), while Hispanics seemed more favorable to these issues (37/53 and 53/40).
Support for same sex marriage also increases with younger people, more educated people, and higher income.
Given all that, I’d say that Coulter is 3/4 with her statement that “opposition to gay marriage is strongest among the Democratic base: blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly.”
Unless it happened more than once, Ms. Coulter got the wrong swing state for the crack, uh, crack. It was in Ohio that police found a crack-for-registrations scheme. It was the very same guy who registered Mary Poppins to vote. And, of course, it wasn’t the Democratic party. It was a contractor to the NAACP National Voter Fund.
Look at the OP, Skopo added the words Democratic Party. Its not clear what the original article said. Pretty obvious that the NAACP isn’t trying to get out the Repulican vote but I doubt they know what this one person was doing. However, if some equally bad accusation turns up against one person working for the GOP be prepared for a shit-storm in the Pit.
Gee, Ann Coulter making dubious claims? That’s so strange!
I’ve read a little of Al Franken’s book “Lying Liars” (or something like that). He really rips into Ms. Coulter, pointing out many of her dubious “facts”. (He takes a good dig at Sean Hannity too.)
I was initally turned off of Franken by his insipid “Stuart Smally” skit/movie. But his political commentary is pretty sharp.
Re-read Coulter’s second paragraph, beginning with “The Democrats threw everything they had at this election…” It’s pretty clear from that context that “they” throughout that paragraph and the next refer to the Democratic Party as a whole.
However, I wasn’t very clear about my questioning of the “strongest opposition to gay marriage” issue. It makes sense within the Democratic party that the named constituents would be most opposed to gay marriage; what I meant to question was whether or not their opposition was stronger than the Republican opposition, which is what Coulter was claiming.
Doctor Jackson, thanks for explaining the van situation. I’d heard something about a GOTV van getting its tires slashed, but I hadn’t heard that it was a Bush/Cheney van.
And thanks to manhattan for the article on the crack situation. So, the assistant director of Ohio’s NAACP “National Voter Fund” hired a woman to get voters registered, and then that woman went and hired some crackhead to make up a bunch of false registrations, who allegedly received crack cocaine in exchange for his imaginative work. And in Coulter’s mind, this means that the Democratic Party was directly bribing people to provide false voter registrations in exchange for crack.
Uhm, yes. I don’t think that 55.4 million people with switchblades showed up in the parking lot that night. One of them would have surely knocked over a garbage can and alerted the neighbors. Heck, I never even said s"ome democrats" were to blame, in fact what I said was:
Cliffy, I apologize if your comment was directed at Ann Coulter and not me. You quoted me, though.
Acorn is one of the groups that registered all of the dead/nonexistant people. They do this every election cycle for the Democrats. It is common knowledge in political circles but nothing is said because they are a minority entity.
There was a spate of attacks on Republican headquarters around the country that received little coverage in the mainstream news. One HQ was shot at in Knoxville, TN and I believe there was at least one other instance of that happening elsewhere in the country. Several headquarters were invaded by union thugs resulting in personal injuries in some cases and several others were burglarized. 20 vans that were meant as part of the GOP get out the vote campaign had their tires slashed. It appears the culprits were the adult children of a couple of prominent Democrats. Several people were arrested for stealing Bush/Cheney campaign signs and in some cases they would leave a swastika or cross burned in the lawn when they left. Keying of cars with Bush/Cheney bumper stickers was so common that a lot of people were afraid to put the stickers on their cars. It was common enough that people were making money from t-shirts that said “I had my car keyed by people of tolerance and diversity”. I could go on about illegal push polling and people being called and told that Gen. Swarzkopf (sp?) supported Kerry etc… but I think that is enough. I am not aware of any proportional shenanigans from the GOP or their supporters. Some of this is anecdotal but you should be able to find cites for most of it.
Ann usually submits her column on Wednesday nights so I am not sure what numbers she had to go with (nor do I know where the ones cited here come from) for the percentages by state but her overall point about Bush gaining ground in this election was valid; as was her point about blacks being very conservative on many social issues. Maybe you should e-mail her and ask her what the source was for those percentages. They appear pretty close to how the vote went.
The point of the Al QaQaa story was that the facility hadn’t been properly searched or secured. The Times had written an article indicating just the opposite when our forces had originally gone through but it didn’t serve their purposes to mention that with the election on the line… or perhaps they forgot depending on how much you trust the Times. How this would have reflected badly on Bush rather than the commanders on the ground is difficult to fathom.
As usual, Ann was closer to the truth than her detractors would wish… or admit. BTW Franken is a comedian and intellectual lightweight. He makes a pretense of being a political commentator. Ann clerked for one of the Circuit Court of Appeals IIRC. Ann may be bombastic but I wouldn’t weigh Franken’s opinions equally. She’s a lot funnier too… and not in the inadvertant way that Franken usually is.
If her claims are so well documented, where are the cites?
Sorry, but I’m not going to believe Ann Coulter is suddenly a reliable barometer of accuracy just on your say-so. Especially when her “obscurity through footnote” technique got exposed by Franken as the sham it is.
Heh. That said, she said “the Democrats,” not the Democratic Party. And a person who is demonstrably a Democrat and who is a contractor to an organization with very heavy Democratic leanings traded crack for registrations.
Certainly not the rhetorical standard I’d aspire to. But if one were to apply the standard of those who would say that “the Republicans” are responsible for the Swift Boat guys, then yes, “Democrats” traded crack for registrations.
Here’s some sign ripping on the other side. A little verbalabuse. My favorite part of that last story is the Republican who planned to leave the U.S. if Kerry won.
A brick was thrown through the window of Republican Party HQ in Chicago while about 70 people were inside watching the results come in. To be frank, I do think that there was more intimidation on the Democratic side which does put a strain on the “tolerance and diversity” message that they are so eager to spout.
As a rule, I wouldn’t trust much of anything said by either Coulter or Franken.
