Re: Ann Coulter: Liberal Arguments: Still A Quagmire
Italgato wrote:I await a critique on this piece. To me, it is pratically unassailable.
I love a challenge.
Ann Coulter wrote:Before the war, they said Saddam Hussein - their favorite world leader behind Jacques Chirac - was not a threat to America's interests in the region, was not developing weapons of mass destruction, and did not harbor terrorists.
Well, this is demonstrably false (Clinton, after all, ordered air strikes against Iraq). But one has to admire Coulter's ability to link liberals, Saddam, and the French in a single sentence. It's like a conservative unassisted triple-play.
Ann Coulter wrote:Now that we've taken the country and are uncovering mass graves, canisters of poison gases, victims of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and colonies of terrorists, liberals are claiming the war created it all.
No, the bodies being unearthed are not victims of Saddams WMD: they were victims of his weapons of
individual destruction.
Ann Coulter wrote:You can't win with these people. The termites are swarming out into the light of day, and liberals are blaming the exterminator.
Is she referring to Tom DeLay,
the exterminator?
Ann Coulter wrote:Liberals simply refuse to consider thoughts that would interfere with their lemming-like groupthink. They hold their hands over their ears like little children who don't want to listen to mother.
A clearer example of a pot impugning the blackness of a kettle I have never seen.
Ann Coulter wrote:Yes, perhaps there are important textural differences between secular Saddam loyalists and Islamic crazies - though it's a little odd to be lectured on nuance from people who can grasp no difference whatsoever between Bill O'Reilly and Jesse Helms.
Wait, is this an actual
concession by Coulter? I think someone should alert the media.
Ann Coulter wrote:But as George Bush said: You are with the terrorists or you are with America. Now we're getting a pretty clear picture of who is with the terrorists.
And with a simplistic, Manichean world-view like this, it's no wonder that Coulter & Co. can't grasp the nuances that face us every day. She probably thinks that water faucets are marked "hot" and "cold" because those are the only two choices we have.
Ann Coulter wrote:But liberals are indignant for every day that we haven't turned a barbaric land into Vermont.
This is an odd statement for Coulter, who, in the wake of 9/11, said we "should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." And
now she's taking a gradualist approach? What changed?
Ann Coulter wrote:Indeed, the war is going so well that now liberals have to create absurd straw-man arguments no one ever uttered in order to accuse the Bush administration of horrible miscalculations.
Someone should tell Coulter what a "strawman" argument really is.
Ann Coulter wrote:Amid her sneering, PMS-induced anger toward the Bush administration...
Ow, PMS! That's gotta' hurt!
Ann Coulter wrote:...New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claimed the Bush administration was "shaken" to discover "the terrible truth: Just because we got Odai and Qusai, Iraqi militants are not going to stop blowing up Westerners." I'd love to see the quote where anyone in the Bush administration - anyone in the universe - said that.
Now
that's a strawman argument! Well done, Ann!
Ann Coulter wrote:Admittedly, Republicans were not mourning the deaths of Odai and Qusai the way Democrats were, but only a moron would think that killing these two monsters would mark the end of the war on terrorism.
I don't even know where to begin correcting the errors here.
Ann Coulter wrote:With all their pointless chitchat about Osama bin Laden...
Oh, man, this is
priceless! We've gone from "Osama must be hunted down and killed" to "it's pointless to talk about him." What has changed in two years? Simple: the Bush administration hasn't been able to catch bin Laden, so bin Laden is clearly not important. Oh, and
everyone always knew that. Coulter must be channelling the ghost of George Orwell.
Ann Coulter wrote:Speaking of which - where is Osama? We haven't heard much from him lately.
Wait a minute. I guess bin Laden
is important. Y'see, it's all very simple: when the failure to capture bin Laden is regarded as a failure of the Bush administration to follow through with its stated plans, then bin Laden is unimportant. When bin Laden's disappearance is regarded as a victory of the Bush administration in driving him underground, then bin Laden is important. See?
Ann Coulter wrote:What is the point of liberal carping? What precisely are they proposing we do? Turn tail and abandon Iraq to the mullahs and the Syrians? Revert to the Democrats' tried-and-true method of abandoning the region to any local Pol Pot who might turn up?
Oh, stop, Ann, yer killin' me! How soon we forget that it was a Republican administration (Ford) that orchestrated America's withdrawl from Southeast Asia.
Ann Coulter wrote:Clinton's statesmanlike response to Islamic fanatics was to do nothing -- except when he needed to distract from his impeachment and would suddenly start bombing foreign countries at random. In eight years, the only domestic Muslim terrorist Clinton went after was a blind cleric sitting outside a mosque in New Jersey behind a card table with an "Ask Me About Terrorism" sign.
OK, that last sentence was actually kinda' clever.
Ann Coulter wrote:The Clinton approach was working great, if you don't count the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombing of our Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole and, finally, the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world right here on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001.
This is remarkably slow for a conservative columnist. Usually, blaming the Clinton administration for
everything (including things like 9/11 that happened
after Clinton left office) is noted earlier in the column. Coulter almost missed the boat on this one.
Ann Coulter wrote:We have seen how well the Democrats' surrender approach works for 50 years.
Granted, in those fifty years there were only 20 years of Democratic presidential administrations, as opposed to 30 years of Republican ones. But hey, the Democrats are somehow responsible for all the bad things that happen, even during Republican administrations.
Ann Coulter wrote:And then last week in Iraq, the little darlings bombed the U.N. embassy in Baghdad.
Well, the UN isn't a sovereign state, so it doesn't have any embassies. It was the UN
headquarters that was bombed. But I apologize for attempting to wedge a fact into an otherwise jam-packed column. Please continue.
Ann Coulter wrote:But that's Bush's fault, too. Perhaps Bush is also responsible for J-Lo and Ben Affleck's bomb of a movie.
A fascinating theory that I, for one, would like to see explored in greater depth.