I’m sorry, are we being dicks to each other now? I must have missed when that started.
Now now, magellan, it was just some “overt hyperbole”. 
Seriously, for somebody who can just laughingly dismiss the fact that a bestselling conservative author accuses American liberals in so many words of being traitors to their country, you sure seem surprisingly touchy about a mere implication by a messageboard poster that there are some racist elements in American conservatism.
I can see how hurling mindless insults, instead of reasoned critiques, at the President can be a bad thing. I just don’t understand how it is in any way a worse thing than hurling such vicious bumper-sticker-style accusations at entire groups of one’s fellow citizens.
Cite for Bush’s clean bill of mental health?
Granted, Cheney hasn’t presented evidence of W’s incapacity to Congress, but what if they’re both nuts? I ask with the knowledge that I don’t know they aren’t.
Actually, no. I thought it was a funny little shot to register my disagreement. Seriously. I apologize if the humor was insufficient or missed it’s mark. Which it evidently was and did.
And I think you know I can be a bigger dick than that when I feel it’s called for.
Nice. I needed that laugh. Thanks.
The meme he was using pops up here all the time. If you see some benefit in preserving American culture, you are a racist. But it was more the way he did it. He left himself many exits to slither through. If he wants to call a group racist, let him do it and prove it. The sleazy piece of shit that he is.
Because whoever our President is it benefits us all that he be able to lead.
Okay, cool. No worries.
But it’s okay for Ann Coulter to repeatedly slur liberals as “traitors”, without proving it?
You can read her book(s) and see if she “proves” it to your satisfaction. It’s not as if she’s throwing around three- and four-word phrases and leaving it at that. Read her stuff if you’re so hungry for her rationale, or to prove her some flavor of evil and/or stupid. You can even start with her articles. Given the word-count constraints of an article, they don’t do as good a job as her books in explaining where she’s coming from, but they should give you a good idea.
Wait a second. Are you saying that Coulter has proved to your satisfaction that all liberals are traitors? Are you saying that you feel she’s successfully justified that statement, and consequently you agree with it?
Okay, that does it. Admit it, just admit it: you’re in love with me. And the only things you care about are things relating to me and what I think. My goodness, girl.
You seem to have forgotten that I don’t think that is what Coulter is saying. That’s what YOU think. So you can read her book and decide for yourself if she is able to prove what YOU think she is saying. I’ve done the reading and hold that she has a more nuanced view than “all liberals are traitors”. This may be a clue that you should start paying attention. Granted, love can throw one into a tizzy. May I suggest that in order to become more “one” with the object of your infatuation you read some Coulter and peek into the depths of his genius.
Hitchens is an asshole who insults the religous - and not just the religous right.
Krugman’s book is full of attacks on the Right, without admitting to the fallacies of the Left.
So if their titles had bit more hypebole to match the content, you would finally admit that the Left has its share of assholes?
I agree that God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is as insulting as Treason, & paints with a broader brush. However, treason is in fact a criminal charge, one that implies a call for the death penalty. Combined with the fact that she implicates one half of the body politic while playing to those who see themselves as the other half, that has a dangerously polarizing effect on politics.
Eh? I have already quite openly asserted, in post #159, that the Republican Party is far more racist than the Democratic, for historical reasons carefully explained. Contradict that if you will, or contradict my characterization of the paleocon faction, but don’t call it “dishonest” or “slippery.” As for “language” and “culture” being euphemisms for race, yes, they are, and sometimes the mask slips. See the OP in this thread.
So’s poisoning.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve done the reading. What I could actually stomach anyway. Not only does she not ‘prove’ anything, but she only barely tries. She ‘proves’ things the way the Bush administration ‘proved’ that Saddam was connected to 9/11, and ‘proved’ Iraq had WMDs. And she apparently doesn’t feel the need to try. She knows her audience will simply lap it up and baaaa for more.
Sorry, but her own words contradict you. She has said explicitly (and I showed you the cite) that ALL people who do not support George W. Bush are traitors—and that includes liberals.
What you seem to be trying to do is to wave away Coulter’s clearly-expressed, never-repudiated slurs against liberals in general by trying to claim some unspecified “nuance” that makes them mean something different. I call bullshit. There’s just as much “nuance” in Coulter’s remarks as there is in Der Trihs’s.
No, but you can think that if it makes you feel better about my pointing out your mistakes.
I’m about two days behind here… let me know if I missed responding to anything anyone wanted me to respond to.
But does it, really? Let’s assume for a moment that your image of Ann is correct, and when she sat down to write Treason, she had some precise point about liberalism that she wanted to make, ie “modern liberalism in America has the following problems, X Y and Z”. So, she dispassionately decided, in the interest of getting that message across as broadly as possible, that instead of writing a book whose title and apparent premise was “Here are some problems with modern liberalism”, she would instead write a book whose title and apparent premise was “All liberals are traitors who hate America”. This would cause such controversy that lots of people would read her book. They would then, upon reading her book, realize that she did not actually mean that all liberals were traitors who hated America, at least not in the obvious, literal, sense. Rather, they would actually have her message about points X Y and Z communicated to them, at which point they would consider those points and see what they could do to address or attack them, thus improving the US for everyone.
However, that didn’t work at all. I’m a liberal. If there are things that I’m doing as a liberal that are bad or wrong or have-unintended-negative-consequences-for-America, I’d like to know what they are. If someone can communicate them to me, hey, great. However, if I pick up her book, I get one page in and she’s done nothing but insult me and my parents and just about everyone else I know (I live in silicon valley). So instead of me learning about X Y and Z and at least getting a chance to think about them, all that happens is that I come on the SDMB and have a screaming match with you.
Note how many Ann Coulter threads there have been in the history of the SDMB. In how many of them have we discussed issues X Y and Z, the hypothetical actual points she is trying to make when she clearly and directly calls liberals traitors? Pretty close to zero.
Thus, purely by observing the outcome, I am forced to conclude that Ann’s writing style does a fantastic job of getting her publicity, and piss-poor job of actually communicating the hypothetical subtle and nuanced position you claim she holds.
I still have to disagree with you here. The more time you have to prepare a position, the more it should be a sober and supportable one. Let’s use the Bush-is-an-idiot example. Do I believe that Bush is an idiot? That is, do I believe he is actually someone of significantly-below-average mental capabilities? Do I believe his IQ is < 80? No. However, I suspect that if you combed through my entire posting history on the SDMB and find just the points where I’m most angry or irritable while posting, you could probably cherry-pick a few paragraphs worth of text that make me seem pretty hyperbolically anti-Bush in pretty unsupportable ways. But so what? The SDMB is a big heap of passionate argument, and when tempers flare of rhetoric demands it, exaggerations are perfectly normal.
However, if someone said “Hey, MaxTheVool, your ideas intrigue me, and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter… please write 10,000 words about your opinion of the Bush presidency”, and this was something that was going to be widely read, something that might, conceivably, have the chance to change someone’s mind or open someone’s eyes, I would be VERY careful to make my comments and attacks supported and sober ones. When I have the time to really lay out the case about the problems with the Bush administration, and the evil and blundering things it has done, I have no need to fall back on rhetorical shorthand.
It is certainly true that everyone likes a victim, and people tend to glom onto victims because it makes good television, and the victimhood gives their claims a perhaps-undeserved mantle of plausibility and respectability. Although you could attempt to take your point too far. I mean, look at Cindy Sheehan back when she started out, before she became Cindy Sheehan. She was a mother whose son had been killed in Iraq. She wanted to tell her story to people in an effort to communicate the human cost of the war. Should she not have? There’s a big difference between her saying something like “This war is killing people. It killed my son. Here’s a picture of him.” and something like “I’m a mother of a son who died in Iraq. Thus you need to listen to me. And I opposed House bill 125.32.”
Another example… quite a bit was made back in the vietnam era about veterans who returned home from the war and then went out, in uniform, to protest against the war. Were they using their status as soldiers to give false weight to what they were saying? Not at all. The fact that they HAD BEEN THERE, and were in fact the polar opposite of the stereotypical protestor (dirty worthless hippy) gave legitimacy and weight to what they were saying, as it should have.
First of all, “the other side does it too” is a pretty weak and meaningless argument. I will respond anyhow.
(1) Others have mentioned this, but the biggest difference is that Bush is a public figure and all-liberals-in-the-US are half the people in the country. Attacking public figures is a time-honored part of public discourse dating back millenia. The hatred towards Bush may be 15% nastier than the hatred towards (say) Clinton. But it’s not something new. Just about every president ever, including many that are now revered, had people who foaming-at-the-mouth-hated-him.
(2) Back to the book-vs-yelling issue, where is the book that someone wrote which claims, in black and white, that Bush is an idiot?
(3) Also, you are making a very dangerous slippery slope argument. If criticizing the president hampers his ability to lead, then criticizing the president hurts the country. And what do we call things that hurt the country? Treason! So criticizing the president is treasonous? Hmmm… seems like that isn’t really what most of us think the Bill of Rights says…
Oh, and while we’re here, I (like kimstu) would appreciate it if you took a second to explain precisely what it is that you think Ann Coulter is trying to communicate when she says (over and over again) that liberals are traitors. Thanks.
First of all, when have I not admitted that the left has its share of assholes?
The left has its share of assholes.
Happy?
However, the point I’m trying to make is twofold:
(1) Ann Coulter is a spectacular beeyatch
(2) There is not automatically some left-wing Ann Coulter just to somehow maintain some cosmic balance. Al Franken is not the left-wing Ann Coulter. Neither is Michael Moore.
To address your specific points:
(1) “Krugman’s book is full of attacks on the Right, without admitting to the fallacies of the Left.” Wait, dear lord, you’re saying that someone who identifies with a political philosophy wrote a book and it was slanted in favor of that philosophy and opposed to the other one? Really?
Can’t you see the enormous difference between “his book is really unbalanced and makes badly constructed arguments cherry picking data and is generally crappy” and “her book’s entire point, in black and white, is that all liberals are traitors/dumb”? They just aren’t the same thing at all.
(2) “Hitchens is an asshole who insults the religous - and not just the religous right.”
Well, I haven’t read his book. I did go to amazon.com and read all of it that I could, namely, the first 5 or so pages of the foreword. And, oddly, none of it involves vitriolic blanket attacks on all religious people. In fact, he talks specifically about two religious people (a teacher and headmaster from his childhood) both of whom he mainly says nice things about.
Before I begin - I personally don’t have an issue with any of these books. I also think that the attention on Coulter only serves her ends, so folks who target her are only filling her bank account thanks to free publicity.
With that, Wiki has a good listing of anti-Bush books out there. I leave it to others to determine if their titles are as poisonous as Coulter’s: