Back to Blog Reload

 

Chapter 11: Ann Coulter's Iraq War Argument Files for Bankruptcy

posted by thehim - 7/30/05

 

A lot of liberals and moderates have a pretty low opinion of Ann Coulter from the times they've seen her on TV, or read an occasional column.  But few have actually read her books.  I read Treason at the time I started Blog Reload, intrigued by the fact that the views that Coulter kept expressing on TV were so similar to the views expressed by a younger Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (which I had read just before that), and I promptly became one of the web's most flagrant violators of Godwin's Law.  Needless to say, reading Treason is a painful experience for an educated adult.  When you read this book, you get the full realization that Ann is still the 11-year-old girl arguing with her teacher about the Vietnam War. 

 

Thankfully, though, Ann shared a lot of thoughts on the upcoming Iraq War in this book, and Chapter 11 of Treason is actually a fascinating read, now with over two years of hindsight to discredit nearly everything she wrote.  For perspective, it's good to remember that this book was a best-selling book in America at the same time that a book claiming that 9/11 was staged dominated the best seller lists in France.  It's becoming more and more difficult to say which book was more far-fetched.  And this chapter is a prime reason why.

 

Here's my breakdown, line by line (this is the entire 26-page chapter), of the lies, the bullshit, the illogical arguments, the already discredited propaganda, and the laugh-out-loud stupid rhetoric from the feeble mind of our nation's most famous stick figure.  I've marked statements that are outright lies with an *, but am open to debate on what is really classified as a lie as Ann is a certified professional bullshit artist.  The text of the book is in italic blockquotes, other referenced quotes are in red italic blockquotes.  As your tour guide, I must warn you; there are parts of this chapter that will make you want to throw things.  I hope that I can provide the appropriate level of snark without sinking to Ann's level.

 

Enjoy.

 

Chapter 11 - NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN HAD HIS REASONS, TOO: TREMBLING IN THE SHADOW OF BRIE

While the form of treachery varies slightly from case to case, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security.

This is pretty typical for the first line of a chapter in this book; a broad attack on an undefined group of people with no evidence to back it up.  Coulter never defines what a liberal is anywhere in this book, so for the sake of simplicity, I will assume that since I opposed our invasion of Iraq, I'm a 'liberal' and just answer some of these allegations directly as if she were talking directly about me.  I hope I don't mischaracterize what someone who Ann Coulter thinks is a 'liberal' would think.

 

Here we go.

Demonstrating their commitment to the war on terrorism, for example, liberals strenuously opposed America doing anything.*

Actually, liberals were very interested in doing several things.  First, they supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the establishment of a more moderate regime.  Second, they supported going after Osama Bin Laden and trying him.  Third, they supported a much more proactive role in resolving conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians.  Fourth, they supported tough inspections to ensure that Saddam Hussein couldn't threaten his neighbors.

Like their delayed-reaction defense of Clinton, liberals were tepidly supportive of war with Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, but were adamantly opposed to war with Iraq.*

Actually, according to this survey, 42% of liberal Democrats supported the war in Iraq.  I can't find a figure on how many supported the war in Afghanistan, so if 'adamantly opposed' is 42%, I'll ballpark 'tepidly supportive' at around 90%.

There was no real organization to the Democrats' arguments against deposing Saddam Hussein, but a lot of hot indignation.*

Yeah, Juan Cole was really blowing a lot of hot air in this post on February 27, 2003, when he said the following things

 

  • The idea that terrorists willing to commit suicide will be afraid of the US after it invades Iraq is just a misreading of human nature.
  • So, this business about controlling everybody all around the world just sounds to me like pie in the sky, and the same sort of thinking that got us mired in the jungles of Vietnam.
  • What happens if the Iraqi Sunni middle classes lose faith in secular Arab nationalism because the Baath is overthrown, and they turn to al-Qaeda-type Islam, in part out of resentment at American hegemony over their country?

Liberals demanded endless "inspections" and "dialogue" and yet more U.N. resolutions.

Yes, endless inspections!  A never-ending bus tour of hippies with magnifying glasses wandering the Iraqi countryside for the remainder of time!

They confidently asserted that Saddam was not an "imminent threat", but then said we couldn't attack because he might use weapons of mass destruction against our troops.

Wow, it turned out that liberals were so right about saying that Iraq was not an "imminent threat" that a panel on Fox News actually lied to cover up the fact that they were disagreeing with them.  And by the way, Ann, there are several countries that are not an "imminent threat" to us, but would sure as hell use any weapons of mass destruction they had against our troops if we attacked them.

They would try the preemptive action argument for a while and then drop that and insist with real earnestness that we work through "the allies."

Work that straw-man!

Then, they'd forget about the allies and say we should be attacking Saudi Arabia.

At this point, the logic behind everything Ann says comes falling apart.  There are certainly differences between attacking Iraq and attacking Saudi Arabia, but what does that say?  The title of this chapter accused 'liberals' of trembling at cheese, yet then Ann accuses them of recklessly wanting to go to war with a country whose government we got along with but whose citizens hate our guts?  How can 'liberals' be both ultra-weak and overly-aggressive at the same time?  I guess only Ann knows the answer to this, and yes, that means that there is no answer.  She's full of shit.

They stamped their feet demanding discussion and then had nothing in particular to discuss, except to say that "of course" Saddam Hussein is detestable, but why didn't George Bush sign Kyoto?

Here's E.J. Dionne with nothing in particular to discuss on March 4, 2003

The greatest challenge to President Bush's Iraq policy comes not from the antiwar movement but from the quiet doubts of foreign policy hawks. They worry not about the morality of Bush's policy but about the administration's capacity to pull off its audacious gamble to transform the Middle East.

These worried hawks share the president's goal of disarming and ousting Saddam Hussein. But they see the months since the United Nations backed tougher inspections as a time of squandered opportunities, flawed public diplomacy and needless political provocation at home.

It will soon become clear as this chapter progresses that the word Kyoto is a favorite for Ann.  It comes out of nowhere and just enters sentences randomly.

And then after one year of all their blather, liberals complained that we were "rushing" to war.  For purposes of artful dodging, liberals would always insist that of course Saddam was despicable and must go.  Just not yet!

Liberal opposition to the military effort to overthrow Saddam was certainly rooted in a desire to wait, but that desire to wait was rooted in a desire to make sure that the outcome would be a success.

First, there were many worthless objections to be raised.  Every single Democrat called Saddam Hussein "despicable." "Despicable" is evidently what Democrats call problems they have no intention of addressing.

As you'll see, a lot of this chapter evokes an image of Ann about to do something incredibly stupid, with people all around her waving their arms frantically and saying, "No Ann!  You're going to regret this!"  But sure enough, she crawled into that barrel, gave the thumbs up, and went over those falls.

Republicans should start referring to inadequate arts funding and large class size as "despicable."

This is actually excellent advice for Republicans, but it was actually an attempt at humor.  Just sad.

The Associated Press reported, "The Democrats always preface comments on Iraq with a general statement that Saddam must go"

How dare they feel that way, but oppose war!  Damn those complex thinkers!!

Whenever a liberal begins a peevish complaint with a throat-clearing equivocation like "Of course, we all agree," your antenna should go up.  This is how liberals couch statements they assume all Americans would demand they make, but which they secretly chafe at.*

Yeah, it really burned Democrats inside to have to publicly admit that they thought Saddam Hussein should no longer rule Iraq.  What a moral quandary.  This crosses the line from being just bullshit to being an outright lie.  And I don't believe that Ann is stupid enough to believe that Democrats opposed the war because they secretly wanted Saddam to stay in power.  I just believe that she knew she could count on enough Republicans to believe it to sell books.  This becomes more and more evident throughout the chapter.

Liberals are masters at simulating agreement with normal people when they believe just the opposite.  I disagree with the American people but you can't catch me.

What the hell is she talking about by saying "you can't catch me?"  Does she realize that, in her fantasy world, in order to carry that out to its logical extreme, liberals would have to do more than just say the same things as Republicans, but also DO the same things as Republicans?  Is it possible for someone to have a worse understanding of politics than Ann? 

 

There's a balance to politics, and in a two-party system, each party caters to one side of that balance.  In Ann's fantasy world, all real Americans think alike, the Republicans think just like them, and the Democrats just pretend to think like them.

Liberal sophistry required pretending they supported America's winning the war on terrorism - and before that, winning the Cold War.  They just have a different plan of action.

So what exactly is the "pretending" part, if she admits they have a plan of action?  Maybe she is dumb enough to believe some of her own bullshit.

Fascinatingly, liberal proposals for achieving the goals - about which "of course, we all agree" - are invariably the opposite of what any normal person might think would work.

Quick quiz:  What's more important;  What a normal person thinks would work?  Or what actually does work?  Most people think that fighting the War on Drugs by throwing drug users in jail is an effective way to fight it.  Unfortunately, it's not, and that has been statistically proven over and over again.  It doesn't really matter what "normal people" think.

 

And it should be clear by now that when Ann says, "any normal person," she means "someone as dumb or dumber than her."  This will be helpful throughout this chapter.

Instead of punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior, liberals often feel it is the better part of valor to reward bad behavior and punish good behavior.*

I guess that's why the Democrats gave Saddam Hussein the ability to obtain deadly weapons throughout the 80s after he'd already been added to the list of terrorist leaders.  Oh wait, those weren't Democrats.

Of course, we all agree that Fidel Castro is a bad man.  That's why we need to lift travel restrictions and trade with Cuba!

Yeah, our Cuba policy is a great example of how successful political isolation and economic sanctions are!  Castro really has a weak grip on power down there!  Moron.

Of course, everyone would like to see Saddam Hussein removed from power.  That's why we must not do anything to remove him from power! 

So let me get this straight.  Republicans believe that Fidel Castro is a bad man and should be removed from power, but they do not advocate invading Cuba.  Democrats take the same exact position with respect to Saddam, and it's some sort of hypocrisy?  

Only in the case of smoking do liberals enthusiastically embrace the otherwise mystifying concept of punishing bad behavior. 

I'm still confused, Ann.  Does this mean that liberals want to invade the smoky bar down my street, arrest the owner, and then replace him with someone who wanted nothing more than to just own the bar in the first place (and who will end up allowing smoking there anyway once the customers demand it)?

The "of course, we all agree" hedge at least proves that liberals are under no illusions about the popularity of what they really believe.

And as we all know, it's more important to be popular than to tell the truth. 

Both living former Democratic presidents, as well as the man liberals thought should be president - Al Gore - argued strenuously against invading Iraq.*

Actually, Bill Clinton supported the invasion. 

Carter said even if the United States produced compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, "this will not indicate any real or proximate threat by Iraq to the United States or to our allies."

After Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Prize in 2002, he said this:

For more than half a century, following the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the Middle East conflict has been a source of worldwide tension. At Camp David in 1978 and in Oslo in 1993, Israelis, Egyptians, and Palestinians have endorsed the only reasonable prescription for peace: United Nations Resolution 242. It condemns the acquisition of territory by force, calls for withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories, and provides for Israelis to live securely and in harmony with their neighbors. There is no other mandate whose implementation could more profoundly improve international relationships.

Perhaps of more immediate concern is the necessity for Iraq to comply fully with the unanimous decision of the Security Council that it eliminate all weapons of mass destruction and permit unimpeded access by inspectors to confirm that this commitment has been honored. The world insists that this be done.

I thought often during my years in the White House of an admonition that we received in our small school in Plains, Georgia, from a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman. She often said: "We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."

It's a shame that other Democrats from Georgia aren't very sensible these days.

After a decade of Iraq ignoring U.N. Security Council resolutions and lying to weapons inspectors, Carter urged that we stick with U.N. inspectors. 

Yes, the U.N. inspectors who were able to perform 400 unannounced inspections in early 2003 without any interference from the Iraqi officials.  And if nothing had changed over the previous decade, then how come an invasion that our military leaders considered untenable all-of-a-sudden became a good idea?

Bill Clinton said, "I'm all for fighting and staying in Afghanistan and getting bin Laden and being tough about that - that's fine."  That's "fine"?  America was in a death match with dagger-wielding savages, and the ex-president acted as if he was doing us a favor by not opposing all antiterrorism efforts. 

Dagger-wielding savages!!  Holy shit Ann, can we head back to the dungeon room and see if we can get some +5 armor for this one?

Gore said that "all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region."  But before invading Iraq, Gore said that we needed to establish peace in the Middle East, create a perfect Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, and get the America-hating French and Germans on board.

I've had mixed feelings on Al Gore over the years, but there are few people who can convince me to like Al Gore more than Ann Coulter.  Oh wait, she's not done babbling…

Also cure baldness and put a man on Mars.  Then the time would be ripe for a preemptive attack!  Unless liberals could find something in outer space that demanded our attention.

Sadly, there was something in outer space that demanded our attention.  It was the belief that we'd be welcomed as liberators in Iraq, and that the nation-building aspect of this adventure would just happen as soon as the Iraqi people got a whiff of "freedom."  No one really knows where in outer space it came from, and thanks to the billions we're wasting in Iraq weekly, we probably won't be able to afford the technology to find it either.

To show we really meant business, Gore said that we should not get sidetracked by a madman developing weapons of mass destruction who threatened his neighbors and once tried to assassinate the president of the United States. 

Al Gore needs to hire Ann to be his PR director.  If he had someone making him look this smart, he could have won more than just the popular vote in 2000.

Rather, Gore said the U.S. military should spend the next twenty years sifting through rubble in Tora Bora until they produce Osama bin Laden's DNA.  "I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task," he said, "simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than predicted."

This is a lesser known aspect of the chickenhawk theory of war: The importance of doing something is inversely proportional to how much patience it requires.

Al Bore wanted to put the war on terrorism in a lockbox. 

Nope, that's not a typo.  A bestselling book in the United States had that sentence in it. 

This was the man Democrats claim - in their sportsmanlike way - "won" the presidential election. 

Wow, sportsmanlike?  Describing Democrats with a positive adjective?  Or was that just cynicism that only retarded people comprehend?

He was the Democrats' most esteemed political figure after Saddam Hussein.*

Arguably the most outrageous line in the whole book and a small window into the way a crazy person actually thinks.

Men don't begrudge women their chattering fearfulness, but these are people who think they should be running the country.

Please email me if that sentence makes sense to you.  I understand each half, but I have no idea what that sentence means with the two halves put together.  Was this book edited?

Democrats made a big point of opposing every antiterrorism initiative on the grounds that Bush should be single-mindedly focused on capturing Osama bin Laden. 

OK, let's have another recap.  On September 11, 2001, a group of people, led by Osama bin Laden, kills several thousand Americans.  Osama bin Laden admits that his organization is responsible, and somehow the focus of our antiterrorism efforts shouldn't be capturing the organization's leader? 

 

I'm real glad Ann hasn't been in charge of fighting organized crime in this country.  Capture John Gotti?  Too hard.  Let's rough up that guy who's on parole for running an unlicensed sports book and can't prove that he's not doing it any more.  That'll send a message to the mobsters.

 

But this paragraph gets even worse.  Hold on to your hats.

They seemed to imagine that President Bush was supposed to be spending his time in Arab bazaars offering bribes to people who might have known where Osama was. 

I'm going out on a limb here and saying that not very many liberals imagined that.

It would have made more sense to carp about sending troops to Normandy when we really needed to be "focusing on Adolf Hitler." 

OK, so we invaded Iraq so that we could clear out the Al Qaeda troops that were keeping us from directly sending troops into Afghanistan?  And I thought Saddam was equal to Hitler in her analogy?  Is it bin Laden now?  I'm so confused.

Bernie Sanders, Socialist congressman from Vermont, said, "The man who killed 3,000 innocent Americans, his name is not Saddam Hussein.  His name is Osama bin Laden."

Goddamn Socialists with their facts.

Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democratic presidential candidate and strange-looking little man, said, "Iraq was not responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon." 

Socialists and strange-looking little men telling the truth!  It's Armageddon!

These were perilous times for the Democrats:  What excuse would they use to oppose the war on terrorism after Osama bin Laden was captured? 

Ideally, it would be nice to use the excuse that we're winning it, and don't need to become paranoid freaks over a small group of even more paranoid freaks on the other side of the planet.

With each additional capture of a major al-Qaeda leader, it turned out that, unlike the Democrats, a Republican administration _could_ chew gum and walk at the same time. 

Sadly, it turned out that it was all they could do, and for some Republicans, it's apparently quite an accomplishment.

The Democrat's infantile obsession with Osama bin Laden to the exclusion of all other Islamic terrorism allowed them to sound like hawks while opposing every aspect of the war on terrorism.

This feels like a good time for little reality interlude.

 

In the Middle East, and in arguably any other place accustomed to tribal warfare and the seemingly endless cycle of political violence that holds back much of the third world, it is vitally important when you've been hit, to hit back, and to hit back at the people at the top.  For most people, this is obvious.  After the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden to us, it was very clear what we had to do.  We had to send whatever military resources necessary over there and apprehend him and his associates.  But all that would do is continue the status quo.  What was more important was to do it in a way that showed the Muslim world that we could both enforce our authority while also having a concern for their needs.

 

We failed on both fronts.  And Iraq was a central reason for that failing.  This is obviously old news at this point, but it can't be stressed enough that even if Iraq was handled considerably better than it was, it still would not have given us the leg-up in fighting the war on terror that capturing bin Laden and al-Zawahiri would have.  Only people in the U.S. saw getting Hussein as a way to strike a blow against terrorists.  And Ann Coulter played a big role in helping paint that inaccurate picture.

If America's entire national defense effort came down to the capture of one man, then the only justification for war was a connection to Osama bin Laden.  For this there was "no evidence." 

The other half of the inaccurate picture that the war cheerleaders painted for us focused on connections between Saddam and bin Laden.  It was easier to bullshit on this because it's harder to prove or disprove a "relationship" exists, but it's always good to remember that Saddam once did his dirty work for us.  "Links" are cheap, "relationships" are what matter.

What liberals mean by "no evidence" is always that there's plenty of evidence, though arguably not enough to convince an O.J. jury. 

And as we'll find out in the next several pages of this chapter, what Ann means by "plenty of evidence," is that there's no evidence at all.

The New York Times assured its readers that there is "no reliable evidence" that Saddam is connected to the September 11 attack or to al-Qaeda and opposed war with Iraq until a "future link between Iraq and terrorism" could be established. 

Not only was the New York Times accurate about this, but ironically, now that we've created that "future link between Iraq and terrorism," there's very little we can now do about it. 

The Times also cheerfully announced that there was "no evidence so far that Baghdad means to share its deadly arsenal with others." 

They did it cheerfully?  Those cocky truth-loving bastards!

So the only guy with the deadly arsenal was a madman who gassed his own people, murdered his family members, and passionately yearned for the total annihilation of the United States.  Well, that's a relief.

Ann, you forgot one thing.  He was also thoroughly paranoid and mistrusted religious fanatics.  People like that aren't very likely to give deadly weapons to religious fanatics.  Was that cheerful enough for you?

Days before the Times's "No Evidence" editorial ran, Khidir Hamza, a former member of Iraq's weapons-building program, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Saddam was actively developing weapons of mass destruction and would have accumulated enough enriched uranium to have three nuclear bombs by 2005.

A scientist who fled Iraq, and hates Saddam?  He couldn't possibly be lying!

The New York Times dealt with this information by not reporting it. 

Much like with Al Gore, Ann is restoring my confidence in the New York Times as well.

Sworn statements given to a Senate committee by a former member of Saddam's government presumably constitute "no evidence."

The amazing thing is that if a person testified under oath that Saddam had destroyed his weapons, Ann would have been jumping up and down yelling that his word should be discredited.  But the fact that it was a "sworn statement" still makes its way in there.

It was undisputed that Saddam Hussein had used chemical and biological weapons in the past.  There was some "evidence" that he was working feverishly to create a nuclear bomb. 

Yes, the word of a person with a strong motivation to lie is strong enough "evidence" to start a war.  By the way, Ann has a law degree from my alma mater, the University of Michigan.  It's a good thing I studied engineering.

Apparently it would take a mushroom cloud over Manhattan and Washington to satisfy the exacting threshold of "evidence" demanded at the Baghdad Times.

Actually, it just would have taken inspections.  I'm guessing most of Ann's readers don't quite understand this, but building a nuclear bomb is not like building an IKEA futon.  It actually takes years for uranium to be enriched, and it takes some pretty sophisticated equipment to do it.  You can't just pack it all up and sneak it out the back door when the inspectors come.  And with the kind of aerial surveillance we had over the country, it would have been impossible to hide this kind of activity at any underground facility where people and equipment have to be continually moved in and out.  But Google that phrase and see how many times that concern was parroted to the public.

ABC's World News Tonight ran a breathless report titled "Reality Check: No Evidence Whatsoever of Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection." 

The reporters were panting and gasping for air as they spoke.

ABC's Martha Raddatz assured viewers: "A senior intelligence official tells ABC News that there is no smoking gun.  There's not even a smoking unfired weapon, linking al Qaeda and Iraq." 

Not even an unsmoking unfired pointy stick.

On National Public Radio, John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor, said Bush had not been able to provide "credible evidence" that "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are joined at the hip."  Is that what liberals were waiting for?

Facts?  Yes, that's what liberals were waiting for.

On The McLaughlin Group, Michael Barone fleshed out the "no evidence!" talking point with Eleanor Clift:

By 2010, if things continue the way they've been going, wingnuts will be convinced that laughter is a Democratic talking point.

Mr. Barone:  Eleanor if you read Michael Ledeen's book, The Terror Masters, you will find that the secular and the religious terrorists and the terror masters work together all the time.

Ms. Clift:  No evidence.

Mr. Barone:  You ought to take a look at the book.  There is a great deal of evidence.

Ms. Clift: No evidence!

Barone could have said Saddam Hussein was a "very bad man" and Eleanor Clift would have shouted, "No evidence!"

It might have helped Barone's case some if, instead of just referencing the book, he actually could have given an example from the book.

Even accepting the ludicrous idea that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction posed no threat to America unless Bush could produce cell phone records connecting Saddam to Mohammed Atta, by September 2002, there was at least some evidence of a link between Saddam and the September 11 terrorists. 

What you're about to read in the next line is real.  Please don't buy the book to find out (I really regret actually buying this copy), she really wrote this.  If you don't believe me, you can go into a bookstore and just leaf to it, it's on page 208.

Czech intelligence claimed that five months before his monstrous attack, Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague.  The CIA discounted that claim, but it's not "no evidence."

That's right.  "Discounted evidence" is still considered a kind of "evidence."  Similarly, "disproven facts" are still "facts."  And "dismissed testimony" is still "testimony."  I'm having serious regrets about not launching more water balloons from my 8th floor South Quad dorm room into the law quad.  How did someone this stupid come out of Ann Arbor?

There was more.  Former director of the CIA James Woolsey was sent by the U.S. government to England soon after 9-11 to investigate any connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Woolsey, as one of the nation's leading neo-conservative cheerleaders, was the perfect person for us to send to get an unbiased answer.

Woolsey concluded there were, saying the evidence was "about as clear as these things get."

Airtight!  Hey Ann, got any more people who were in the running for jobs in a US-led Iraq to make the case?

Amid a raft of disclaimers, ABC's Nightline interviewed two Iraqis imprisoned by the Kurds, both of whom asserted that there was a working relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq.* 

Now this is about as disingenuous as it gets, notice that she says between al-Qaeda and Iraq, and not al-Qaeda and Saddam.  There was an al-Qaeda group, Ansar al-Islam, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which operated in a part of Northern Iraq that Saddam had no real support in.  That's some smoking gun!

Abu Aman Amaleeki said, "There is a relationship between the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.  It began approximately after the invasion of Kuwait." 

This quote had a footnote pointing to an episode of Nightline with Chris Bury in September 2002.  Strangely enough, a Google search is unable to find any results when you search for "Abu Aman Amaleeki Chris Bury."  I'm not saying Ann is lying here, but I find it amazing that not a single warblogger posted something about this.  There's absolutely nothing out there about this, which if it were even remotely true, would've significantly helped the Bush Administration make their case for war. 

 

The amazing thing about all of these people who trumpet links between Saddam and al-Qaeda is that none of them can figure out that if there really was a smoking gun for a provable relationship, Bush and Cheney would've put it up on billboards all over the country.  They didn't have shit, and they knew it.

Another captured prisoner, Muhammed Mansur Shihabili, said he had killed "for the Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda."  No evidence!

Also references Chris Bury on Nightline from September 2002.  Also returns nothing through a Google search.  Not even the name alone returns anything related to Iraq.  And not even this letter to the editor from Larry Smith of Harrisburg, OR, but only because when poor Larry retyped it nearly verbatim from his copy of Treason and sent it into his local paper, he mistyped "Mansur."

In addition, people arguably as credible as anonymous officials quoted in the New York Times kept saying Iraq was working with al-Qaeda.  National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice said, "Yes, there are contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda." 

Hell, there are contacts between North Korea and Japan, that doesn't mean that North Korea is giving Japan its nukes anytime soon.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "Iraq provided unspecified training, relating to chemical and/or biological matters, for al-Qaeda members.

Unfortunately, this has turned out to be neither an unknown known nor a known unknown.  It was actually just horseshit.

He specifically said, "If you're asking, are there al-Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes, there are.  It's a fact." 

And before 9-11 (and probably today) were there al-Qaeda in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Brazil, and Spain?

ABC News questioned the objectivity of Rumsfeld and Rice, noting their "clear" motive for connecting al-Qaeda to Iraq:  "It provides yet another rationale - terrorism - for American military action."  Okay, but denying a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq provides yet another rationale for America not taking any military action. 

No war?  That's no fun.

So where does that get us?  Why are only the statements of anti-war Democrats treated as objective statements of the truth?

There's actually a very complex answer to this, and it deals with forces of nature, and people's inner weaknesses when faced with certain threats.  It also deals with the secret cabal of large media conglomerates and the kinds of people who strive for careers in politics.  Oh wait, hold on.  I'm thinking of a more difficult question.  Apparently, the anti-war Democrats were just right the whole time.

Liberals so loved the sound of the ringing peroration "No Evidence!" that they began popping up all over to pronounce that there was "no evidence" supporting this or that argument for war. 

It's amazing what people will do to prevent an unnecessary war.  It's as if people were going to die if they didn't do anything.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) said there was "no evidence" that Saddam was "an imminent threat," "no evidence" that he was "nuclear-capable today," and "no evidence" that China is covertly assisting the Iraqi to develop any weapons, including nuclear. 

Whoa-hoa!  China?  How did I miss that one?  I heard a lot of crazy shit in the Slate message boards before the war, but I don't remember that one.  I guess if Dianne Feinstein can't see the secret China-Iraq plot to take over the world, well then she's not even cut out to be a PTA mom.

So Saddam was merely a future threat who would soon have nuclear weapons. 

Saddam was more likely to obtain a nuclear bomb by having one land on one of his palaces and not detonate than he was by actually building one.

Representative Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) told CNBC's Brian Williams, "We do not need to invade to destroy the weapons.  There's no evidence for that." 

2004 Election Result:  Jim McDermott - 81% of the vote

Representative Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said, "We have been in briefings for the last week and we have seen no evidence of imminent danger."

2004 Election Result:  Diane DeGette - 73% of the vote

During the Senate debate, Senator Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) said that, while there was "much speculation" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, there was "no evidence that he has developed nuclear capability and less that he could deliver it."  Less than no evidence. 

Much less.

Jeffords, whose earlier history-making moment was to leave the Republican Party after Bush was elected president, also said Saddam wouldn't use weapons of mass destruction after he has "paid so dearly" to acquire them.  As the saying goes, when Jeffords switched parties, it improved the average IQ of both parties. 

Whoever Ann had to pay royalties to for the use of that joke...well, they probably needed the money.

"No evidence" became the Democrats' battle cry.  It was used as often as the impeachment-era phrase "does not rise to the level of," often applied to utterly absurd scenarios. 

Absurd scenarios?  Like a president being impeached for fooling around with an intern?

Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) astutely pointed out, "They have no evidence or even a reasonable suspicion that Saddam Hussein was involved in any way with the anthrax attacks." 

When will this strange little man stop being right about everything?!?

Was that the crucial question in the debate on Iraq?  Whether Saddam has sent the anthrax? 

No, but it was probably the question he was asked, Ann.  Taking quotes out of context is fun!

These people didn't want a smoking gun: They wanted a smoking U.S. city.

That's definitely true.  It's a long flight over to Amsterdam.  I'd like to have that here.

Liberals also denounced Bush for staging a "preemptive" attack against Iraq. 

I think now is a good time to explain Ann's use of quotes.  Ann puts words like preemptive in quotes as a way to make them appear as if they are sneaky buzzwords that liberals use in order to trick you.  Let's try that sentence again with a difference use of quotes. 

Ann puts "words" like preemptive in quotes as a way to make them appear as if they are sneaky buzzwords that liberals use in order to trick you.

See, just putting the word words in quotes makes you begin to ask yourself, is preemptive really a word?  Putting something in quotes allows Ann to make a word seem more like a buzzword that we should wary of how it is used in a political fashion.  It's a very effective weapon for piling up the bullshit to the mind-blowing heights that she does in this chapter.

Gore claimed Bush was "proclaiming a new, uniquely American right to preemptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat."  He warned, "The apprehensions in the rest of the world" were "not calmed down any by this doctrine of preemption that they are now asserting." 

One of the major disconnects of the neo-con agenda was that the rest of the world was somehow ready to decree a new level of trust in the United States to be judge, jury, and executioner.  What Gore said above is pretty accurate.  The rest of the world was apprehensive about America becoming too unrestrained in their willingness to use military force.  It can be hard for the average American to understand why a person in another country would be apprehensive about that (hey, we trust America, right?), and Coulter really used that to her advantage in making her case here.

Once Gore hit the tuning fork, all the Democrats started vibrating in harmony.  Giving a speech in London, Clinton said, "A preemptive action today, however justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future." 

Yeah, OK Ann.  Bill Clinton is looking to Al Gore to figure out where to weigh in on an issue.  Riiiiiiight.

Senator Tom Daschle worried about the "message" it would send to the rest of the world, saying to act "in a preemptive manner would be a terrible tragedy and set all the wrong precedents and send the wrong messages to the world community."

And Tom Daschle is a forgotten man now, thanks in part to the message that his "Yes" vote on the war sent to Democrats.

What message would that be?  That the U.S. will act decisively to prevent rogue nations from developing nuclear weapons?  Isn't that the message we were trying to send?  It's clear why America's enemies wouldn't care for that message, but why would any American be against it?

Yes, that's the message we were trying to send.  But there's a very big difference between trying to send a certain message, and actually sending it.  By invading Iraq, who had no nuclear weapons, while ignoring both North Korea and Iran, who are actually building nuclear weapons, as well as Osama Bin Laden, who had actually killed Americans through terrorism, and the Israeli-Palestinian situation, which would have given us the ability to send a very strong positive message about how much we cared about stopping terrorism everywhere, we sent the message that we don't care about anything or anyone.  We care about doing what we want to do.  Americans may have been convinced that we were fighting terrorism, but the rest of the world was worried that we were only interested in settling old scores and getting our hands on Iraqi oil reserves.  Ann only sees two groups in this question, Americans and America's enemies.  There's a third group, America's allies, and that group is a lot more important than most Americans understand today.  We lose the war on terror when we convince our allies that our enemies might be right.

A writer for the Los Angeles Times summarized the Democrats' argument, explaining that "attacking Iraq now would give license for other nations to invade antagonists they consider potential threats.  Think India and Pakistan, or China and Taiwan." 

Strangely enough, in the neo-con camp, this argument was also used to convince us that a preemptive attack could convince China to invade North Korea.  China's probably not going to invade anyone in the next few years, but if they do, it's definitely more likely to be Taiwan than North Korea.

That's a blockbuster of an argument.  It is like the brilliant riposte "Who are you to say?"  Who are we to say when America can attack another country?  I don't know, why not us? 

Well, Ann, most of us who aren't spoiled brats know that when you're part of a community, you can't just do whatever you want.  Thanks for turning America into the screaming 8 year old whose mom won't buy him what he wants at the supermarket.  The United States is part of a world community, and even though we're the biggest, strongest, member of that world community, we still don't get to just do whatever we want.

If the French found the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe in rubble, would they seek our permission before launching their cheeses of mass destruction?

It depends on whether or not we were the ones who did it.

The New York Times, ("Europe's Best Newspaper") was in a panic over the shocking Bush policy of deploying American troops in order to protect American interests. 

By protecting American interests, I believe Ann means provoking a lengthy war with the Arab world so that our leaders can keep us scared while they dismantle our social programs.

The only just wars, liberals believe, are those in which the United States has no stake.* 

It truly blows my mind that people could read that sentence and still take Ann seriously.

Thus, the Times and various McTimes across the nation kept touting the idea that invading Iraq "only" to produce a regime change was unjustifiable, contrary to international law, and a grievous affront to the peace-loving Europeans. 

Don't forget about how it would cause us to have to keep large numbers of American troops trapped inside a hellhole of civil unrest and ethnic conflict for decades while propping up a regime closely allied with a rogue government building nuclear weapons.

As the left's new pet, Henry "No Longer a War Criminal" Kissinger, said, "Regime change as a goal for military intervention challenges the international system established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia…And the notion of justified preemption runs counter to modern international law, which sanctions the use of force in self-defense only against actual, not potential, threats."

I wish I could say that Henry Kissinger is by far the most ridiculous person in this book to be called a leftist by Ann, but I can't.

The idea that America would be transgressing the laws of man and God by invading Iraq - unless and until Saddam nukes Manhattan - was absurd.  Did no one remember Clinton's misadventure in the Balkans? 

I don't remember a misadventure as much as I remember a NATO action that was mildly controversial, but was able to stop a dictator from actively killing off members of a minority ethnic group. 

Liberals loved that war because Slobodan Milosevic posed no conceivable threat to the United States.*

Actually, liberals had mixed feelings about that war.  And I don't have any surveys to back this up, but I'm guessing that the fact that it helped stop an active genocide was what won over the liberals who supported it.

To the contrary, as President Clinton put it, "This is America at its best.  We seek no territorial gain; we seek no political advantage." 

I guess Ann thinks that America can only be at its best when it's being greedy.  I don't know how else to interpret that.  Since when do people mock unselfishness in the effort of stopping genocide?

Deposing Milosevic, Clinton explained, vindicated no national interest, but was urgent because it was akin to stopping a "hate crime." 

And with the simple use of quotes, Ann is able to turn a genocide into just a liberal talking point. 

One searched in vain for a description of some American interest in the Balkans.  For the record, there was no U.N. Security Council approval for Clinton's unprovoked attack on the Serbs.

No, but there was support from the neighboring countries and NATO.  In Iraq, we couldn't even get Turkey on board.

Instead of droning on about "human dignity" and "human rights," why shouldn't American foreign policy be based on the national interest? 

All this time I thought I was living in a country where human dignity and human rights were in our national interest.  How foolish of me.

When did self-defense become a less respectable cause for war than liberation of oppressed peoples?

Oh, around the middle of 2004 when we realized there were no WMDs.

As it turned out, the Democrats were overhasty in their use of the word "genocide" in connection with Milosevic.  Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen, estimated that 100,000 Albanian civilians "may have been murdered."  In the end, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found fewer than 3,000 bodies, most of them men of military age. 

Yet when 3,000 Americans are killed, Ann thinks we can start invading Muslim countries at will.

That doesn't make Milosevic a hero, but he's a piker compared to Saddam, who has gassed tens of thousands of his own people and God knows how many enemy troops. 

Wow, with that kind of record, you'd never be able to get him to stop.  Wait, he stopped gassing his people and putting them in mass graves a decade ago?  Oh, forget it then.

So it's especially striking that liberals opposed a war with Iraq, despite Saddam's far more impressive credentials as a mass murderer.

It's time for another reality check here, as Ann touches on some very interesting points that an intelligent person might have been able to mold into a forceful argument.  The war to oust Milosevic was certainly an action not taken in self-defense.  Yet that was not the real difference between that offensive and Iraq.  There were three major differences between the Balkans and Iraq that have caused one to be a relatively bloodless campaign and the other to be an un-winnable mess. 

 

1)      We had support from neighbors in the region.  This was something we absolutely needed in Iraq.  The outcome would have been considerably different if we had the Arab League supporting us.  Part of the decision over going to war electively, as we did with both the Balkans and Iraq, is to gauge the cost.  The Clinton Administration accurately gauged the cost of both war and occupation for Kosovo.  As for Bush in Iraq, not so well.

2)      We weren't lying about Slobodan Milosevic's weapons capabilities.  We may have overestimated the lengths of the genocide, but that hardly does the kind of damage to a future occupation than what happens when you blatantly lie about your reasons for claiming that you are acting in self-defense.  Trust, especially in the Middle East, is an integral part of a successful military occupation.  We lost that battle even before it began.  There's a right way and a wrong way to liberate people, and it makes no difference whether or not the people back home think you're operating in self-defense.  Most of the arguments you hear from those who still tout Iraq as a success now tout exactly the things that Ann mocked.

3)      We had a sufficient alliance with other world powers.  With NATO, it was very easy to establish that this was an international alliance.  People like Ann mock the importance of that, but it really does matter.  In the Balkans, the occupying forces were seen as representing the will of the entire European community.  This gives a population the idea that there is widespread support for what is happening.  In Iraq, most people consider this an American invasion (with Israel, as always, behind it), and they feel less restraint over fighting it.  With our squabbling with the French, Russians, Germans, and Chinese, we successfully gave the Iraqi resistance the ability to convince the average Iraqi that we won't be able to pull the world community towards our cause of eliminating terrorists there, and that the only way to stop the terrorists is to help them get us out of there.

 

In the end, both the Balkans and Iraq were wars of liberation.  One was a clearly defined and well planned offensive.  One was a calculated ruse of protecting Americans and based upon unrealistic notions of American power.

If they were enthusiastic about deposing Milosevic, liberals should have been burning with desire to take out Saddam Hussein. 

And here lies the central difference between liberals and conservatives today.  Liberals allow reason to triumph over emotion.

But they were not:  Deposing Saddam was in the self-interest of the United States.  Only a war that serves no conceivable national interest gets the New York Times's endorsement.*

If what we did in Iraq was in our self-interest, I'd hate to see a war that wasn't.

Liberals warm to the idea of American mothers weeping for their sons, but only if their deaths will not make America any safer.* 

Conservatives have made this situation a daily occurrence.

The point - which is always the same point - is that we must not protect ourselves.* 

Uh, no Ann.  The point was that there were risks involved with trying to occupy and rebuild a country of 25 million people in a part of the world where we are not trusted.  My fucking cat knew that.

Liberals believe they are best qualified in war and peace and forced busing because they aren't going to suffer the consequences.* 

One day, I truly hope that Ann has to suffer the consequences of peace, and maybe a forced busing to an insane asylum.

They seemed not to understand that - unlike their other insane policies - keeping Saddam Hussein in power would affect their children, too. 

Yes, it may have enabled them to have the same opportunities for wealth and advancement as their parents.  Oh well.

Nuclear annihilation cannot be safely confined to the outer boroughs.

Sadly, neither could Ann.

The left's counterintuitive national security positions are always backed up with long, complicated explanations about the dire risk of encouraging "hard-liners," inciting the enemy's "paranoia," or annoying what are comically known as "the allies." 

Yep, you read that right.  In Ann's world, it's counterintuitive to believe that encouraging extremists, making people fear you, and pissing off your friends will come back to bite you in the ass. 

The arguments not only make no sense ab initio, but openly contradict one another.

Latin!  Feisty!

Though the Democrats would later decide that for their defeatist objectives, Saddam Hussein was irrelevant to the "war on terrorism," immediately after the terrorist attack, they began complaining that former president Bush had not "finished off the job" with Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War.*

Just as a quick note, I'm not including the original footnote markers from the book, so I'll just make it clear that none of the quotes above were attributed to anyone in particular.

The Democrats hadn't supported starting that war, much less finishing it.  Forty-eight Democrats in the Senate voted against the Gulf War.

This is the first book I've ever read where the author has to lie just to feel comfortable about following it up with something truthful.

Only ten Senate Democrats supported it - and the only one north of the Mason-Dixon Line was Senator Joe Lieberman.  Indeed, this is Senator Lierberman's one codpiece for the claim he's a "different kind of Democrat."

Yeah, he's a different kind of Democrat.  A completely useless one.

Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, opposed the 1991 war with Iraq, but a decade later she, too, was carping about the first Bush administration not finishing the job she didn't want to start. 

I guess if someone opposes you doing something, it's ok not to do it right?  Is that the message here?

When America was again poised to depose Saddam in 2002, Albright was against it. 

And as we all know, nothing can change in 11 years.

As she explained in a New York Times op-ed, Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons, he probably had "significant quantities of biological warfare agents and some chemical munitions," and he was "striving to acquire or develop nuclear weapons." 

This was all footnoted to a speech from Madeleine Albright from September of 2002, although the amount of word games done in the next few lines is extraordinary.

But America should do nothing.* 

Actually, this is the same as the first lie from the beginning of the chapter.  I'm not sure I should count this again.  What the hell, no one's going to read this far.

Iraq, Albright said, was not "the right focus" in the war on terrorism. 

Boy was she way off on that!

The "right focus" was getting the United Nations to issue yet another useless ultimatum.* 

Sure Ann, dealing with Iraq was the entire scope of the War on Terror.

Saddam had ignored scores of such ultimatums throughout Albright's tenure as secretary of state to no ill effect. 

I can't think of anything snarky right now, so I'd just like to point at that Israel has ignored more UN ultimatums than anyone, and no one on the right is clamoring to invade Israel, even though they DO have WMDs.

But she confidently asserted that Saddam "must surely be aware that if he ever again tries to attack another country he will be obliterated."  By whom?  Not us - our liberals won't let us. 

So Ann provides a quote saying that Madeleine Albright would support a war if Saddam attacked a neighbor and then says that liberals won't support that war?  My head hurts.

Democrats always assure us that deterrence will work, but when the time comes to deter, they're against it. 

Deterrence always works, that's the definition of the word.  Jeebus, buy a fucking dictionary.

A New York Times editorial urged patient suasion with the harmless and misunderstood Saddam Hussein, demanding that "every available diplomatic option" be exhausted. 

Reading this chapter is like listening to someone talk about how they're going to win the lottery.  "People say that the odds are 1 in 3 trillion.  Nonsense, my lucky numbers are due." 

In the breezy style the Times uses for all its crackpot ideas, it explained that America need only "ensure that Iraq is disarmed of all unconventional weapons." 

The New York Times might be even more cheerful and breezy if it wasn't so worried about one of Ann Coulter's minions blowing up their office.

Meanwhile, the same editorial warned against invading Iraq on the grounds that "there may be no way to deter Iraq from using unconventional weapons." 

Is she saying that we should wage war if it could result in large numbers of American casualties while gaining us practically nothing?  Not even Saddam was that bad of a military strategist.

Weren't we easily disarming Saddam of unconventional weapons a couple paragraphs back? 

Is Ann really this stupid?  Of course she is!  In Ann's fantasy-land, if a despised dictator might have weapons the entire world doesn't want him to have, the smartest thing to do is to abandon inspections and to create as much chaos there as possible.  That way, if there are weapons, they'll either be used on us, or stolen by actual terrorists to be used on us later.  It's fucking genius!

They wanted to play a game of cat and mouse with Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. 

Well, yes, where the mouse is already in the trap, and the cat gets to go wherever he wants to find the cheeses of mass destruction that the French gave him.

Liberals said we didn't have to worry if Saddam gets nuclear weapons because he is a reasonable man. 

So I presume, since the Bush Administration isn't planning to attack North Korea, that we don't have to worry when Kim Jong-Il gets nuclear weapons because he is a reasonable man?

He would never use them, they assure us, because he "knows" the U.S. would destroy him. 

And I'm still not sure I "know" why Ann put that word in quotes.

We could just disarm him - but that wouldn't be fair!  That wouldn't even give him a sporting chance to build a nuclear weapon.

It's a good thing we disarmed Saddam and gave the average Iraqi citizen the ability to arm themself to the teeth.  Wonderful strategy there.

Liberals longed to create a nuclear standoff with a madman feverishly developing weapons of mass destruction, who gassed his own people and watched torture videos for fun. 

And we would have only had to wait until 2045 when Saddam's scientists finally got it done.

On the basis of how liberals reacted to Mutually Assured Destruction with the Soviet Union, Americans should have been terrified that they were recommending it again with Iraq. 

Comparing the nuclear capabilities of the Soviet Union to Iraq's arsenal?  That's like comparing a grenade launcher to a slingshot.  She can't be serious.

MAD was bad enough with the Soviet Union but there was a certain illiterate logic to it.  Most obviously, the Soviet Union already had nuclear weapons. 

My lord, she is dumb.

Saddam Hussein didn't.  Why did liberals want to let him get there? 

Maybe because we knew that if we invaded to stop him and then became entrenched in a war with Iraqi nationalists, the Iranians and North Koreans would be able to get there first.

It was at least vaguely credible that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to stop the Soviets from rolling into Paris. 

Ann, there's nothing you've written in this chapter that is vaguely credible.

The French may not have been willing to fight for Paris in 1940, but we kept assuring our NATO "partners" that we would defend them with our nukes. 

And our NATO "partners" looked at us and said, "What the fuck are nukes going to do, jackass, other than cause the world to distrust you?"

It is not very credible that the U.S. would risk nuclear attack on our forces to defend Kuwait. 

I guess that's why we had to make up a bunch of phony reasons to convince Americans that this war was actually one where we were defending America.

Liberals aren't too keen on defending Europe; the Middle East has fewer attractions and the people are no more charming than the French. 

I bet more charming people would've accepted us as liberators.

With all of the gnashing of teeth over attacking Iraq before Saddam had nuclear weapons, how much worse would it be if he did? 

It would be nearly as bad as if all of our armed forces were tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan while every other country that hates us builds nukes.

Would liberals favor risking a nuclear attack on our troops "just for oil"?

Do I have to answer that?

The last time we faced a horrible adversary with nuclear weapons, towns throughout Vermont declared themselves "nuclear free zones." 

I think when Ann said "The last time," I believe she meant "The only time."

Brown University students demanded cyanide pills in the event of a nuclear attack. 

So they can die twice?  Is there a point here?

There were glowing portraits in the New York Times about groups like European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament. 

Cheerful, breezy, glowing portraits.

There were endless op-eds about the "suicidal" arms buildup of "these doomsday weapons."  In theory, peaceniks claimed they wanted "both sides" to disarm. 

Oh dear god.  See, this is how this works.  A word like "peaceniks" becomes defined as a subset of people within our culture who want all countries to disarm.  But then it becomes a stereotype, and therefore people like Ann Coulter can twist and bend that stereotype into whatever they want.  The original belief that the stereotype was associated with just becomes the rational stereotype that those people only pretend to believe in, but really they're just traitors.

But as George Orwell said during World War II, "Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it." 

George Orwell also said this:

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.  In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.  All rulers of all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency.  So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious.   

 I'd like to think that Ann doesn't understand George Orwell, but I know she does.  She just doesn't care. 

In practical effect, the "pacifist" was pro-Nazi.*

Just to get an idea of how ridiculous that statement is, here's an excerpt from Chapter 10, Causes of the Collapse, from Mein Kampf:

While the Jews in their Marxist and democratic press proclaimed to the whole world the lie about '  German militarism' and sought to incriminate Germany by all means, the Marxist and democratic parties were obstructing any comprehensive training of the German national man-power.  The enormous crime that was thus committed could not help but be clear to everyone who just considered that, in case of a coming war, the entire nation would have to take up arms, and that, therefore, through the rascality of these savory representatives of their own so-called '  popular representation,' millions of Germans were driven to face the enemy half-trained and badly trained.  But even if the consequences resulting from the brutal and savage unscrupulousness of these parliamentary pimps were left entirely out of consideration: this lack of trained soldiers at the beginning of the War could easily lead to its loss, and this was most terribly confirmed in the great World War. 

The loss of the fight for the freedom and independence of the German nation is the result of the half-heartedness and weakness manifested in peacetime as regards drafting the entire national man-power for the defense of the fatherland. 

I'm not sure that logic won over too many pacifists.

With Iraq we had a chance to avoid a nuclear standoff with a totalitarian despot and avoid the insane stasis of Mutually Assured Destruction, but liberals counseled restraint.

Actually, we counseled that the people who read this crap should remove their heads from their asses and realize that we also had a chance to avoid an unwinnable occupation as we get into a nuclear standoff with a totalitarian despot.

Put that off for another day - when the despot has a nuclear weapon and liberals can scream about nuclear winter while letting Saddam run wild throughout the Middle East. 

It's hard to come up with anything new to say about this, it's just the same crap over and over again.

Democrats were panicked at the idea that America might defend itself by attacking Iraq, but were perfectly copacetic about living in a radioactive world. 

I had to look up the word copacetic as it's got the spell-checker underline going here.  Apparently, the origin of the word is not known, but the two most common explanations are that either it comes from a Yiddish phrase or it was invented by a former-shoeshine-boy-turned-entertainer named Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.  There was really no point in sharing that, but I need to pace myself here, this isn't even halfway through the chapter. 

What liberals were really saying was that the U.S. should get out of the region and resign itself to whatever happens. 

Even the fantastic exaggerations of what Ann thought liberals believed in were STILL more likely to succeed than what we actually did.

Don't rush into war when you can console yourself with preemptive surrender! 

*sigh*

So what if Saddam eventually gets control of half the world's oil?  That would be a fitting punishment for the U.S.'s rejection of the Kyoto Treaty!

One the most striking aspects of this time was how personal this whole thing became.  Even though it could have been something more, our invasion of Iraq was more about going out and getting a bad guy than anything.  That can be a part of the right strategy in some circumstances, but with Saddam, it was seen by the people of the Middle East as settling an old score and not as a way to help them defeat terrorism.  People in the Middle East know the difference between justice and retribution.  They see too little of the former and too much of the latter. 

Liberals didn't want to talk about what would happen if Saddam acquired nuclear weapons, but kept claiming they did want to talk about something before invading Iraq. 

Let's try that sentence a different way for clarity. 

 

"NASA Scientists didn't want to talk about what would happen if the little green men on Mars attacked the rover craft, stole our technology, and invaded Earth, but kept claiming they did want to send a craft to Mars without a nuclear rocket attached to it."

They said they wanted more "discussion" and that they had lots and lots of questions. 

My main question at the time, if I remember correctly, was:  "Have you morons lost your fucking minds?"

The insistent demand for "more discussion" about Iraq tended to leave the impression that these Democrats had something on their minds.  But they never had anything to say - except that we needed "more discussion."*

More from Juan Cole's Informed Comment in October of 2002:

 

On 10/28/02:

Jane Merrick of the Press Association reported that the Oxford Research Group believes and Iraq war will increase terrorism by al-Qaeda against the United States. It believes that 10,000 civilians will die in an American attack on Iraq.

And 10/5/02:

Wolfowitz's is to my mind a very, very dangerous view of the world, and his plans will quite likely end up substantially reducing our security rather than enhancing it, as we have already seen in the case of the Reagan Afghanistan policy, which helped create blowback in the form of al-Qaeda.

Actually, if you go to just about any internet site that was paying attention to what was really happening, you'll find numerous instances of people with "something to say."  There are some lies that Ann tells in this chapter that stand above the rest in their blatant outrageousness, and this is near the top of that list.

In September 2002, "legendary newsman," "national treasure," and pompous liberal gasbag Walter Cronkite complained on Larry King Live that there had not been sufficient "discussion" of the plan with Iraq. 

There is truly nothing beyond the pale for Ann.

He said, "We haven't had the discussion yet.  We've had unilateral approach by this administration to a unilateral solution." 

Apparently some liberal gasbags in the British government were saying the same thing

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Oops.

Uttering the classic liberal equivocation that Saddam Hussein was cause for "deep concern," Cronkite stated categorically, "We don't have adequate evidence now" to invade Iraq. 

He was totally ignoring the discounted evidence!

This is evidently what passes for "discussion" in Manhattan salons. 

Salons?  Boy, Ann really relies on people's thorough ignorance of urban America.

It was "very important," "terribly important," and "terribly important" again, that there be "wide open discussion" in Congress and by the public "as to the wisdom of the Iraqi program." 

As a side note here, Treason covers much more than just the Iraq War.  It covers from the McCarthy era through current day.  What's amazing about reading through the earlier stuff is that because I haven't studied earlier eras as closely as I know current events, I don't immediately see through the BS.  Reading this chapter put it all in perspective for me, but I'd love it if someone could do this with some of the earlier chapters.

The quiescence of the Democrats left Cronkite "very, very surprised."  But he looked forward to their pointless nay-saying in the future.  (He wouldn't have to wait long.)

I've already used the barrel over the falls analogy, but reading this book is also like listening to guy who's about to jump the Grand Canyon with a Buick Skylark and a plywood ramp.

Walter Cronkite was inconsolable that the press hadn't succeeded in demoralizing the country in the war on terrorism. 

Larry King should've decked him.

During the Vietnam War, the "most trusted man in America" managed to persuade America that the Tet offensive had been a defeat.

This is one of those points where I wish I had a more thorough knowledge of the Vietnam War, a topic from earlier in this book.  But I think it's fair to say that the Tet Offensive was the turning point in the war.  And I don't believe we achieved victory in that war.

After watching Cronkite's coverage of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in December 1972, Ronald Reagan told President Nixon that "under World War II circumstances, the network would have been charged with treason." 

Maybe they could have thrown him in a Japanese internment camp with all the other traitors.

On Larry King in 2002, Cronkite was hearkening back to the halcyon days when the media could control the public's perception of a war. 

Yes, because it's only possible for the media to convince the public that a war is going poorly.

The president of the Ho Chi Minh Admiration Society said the media were not "adequately skeptical" of the information they were getting from the administration and "passing that skepticism along to the American people." 

The truly sad thing here is that this was written on June 7, 2005 in the commie rag The New York Times:

President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain presented a united front on Tuesday against a recently disclosed British government memorandum that said in July 2002 that American intelligence was being "fixed" around the policy of removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

"There's nothing farther from the truth," Mr. Bush said in his first public comments about the so-called Downing Street memo, which has created anger among the administration's critics who see it as evidence that the president was intent to go to war with Iraq earlier than the White House has said.

Someone's scared of being called names by a 6-foot-tall 73-pound woman.

Frustratingly, Americans were supporting America. 

This is one of the numerous expressions in this book that becomes more realistic when you read it as Ann venting about reality instead of Ann being cynical about her fantasy world.

He was disappointed that the press had not been able to suppress President Bush's soaring approval ratings:  "When [Bush] speaks, he's listened to.  When he speaks, he gets time on the air…. So you've got to expect some of that." 

Yeah, they're still suppressing his high approval ratings!  I haven't heard about them in months.  Oh, he's at 43 percent. 

Uncle Walter explained the widespread support for war, saying the public was "not very keen, not very aware, not very sophisticated about getting the information it needs."

I wish I had an Uncle Walter.  He sounds like a smart guy.

And liberals had nearly tired themselves out discussing the need for more discussion, on October 7, 2002, the president of the United States gave a speech on the precise topic they all claimed to be burning with desire to "discuss."  Fox was the only broadcast network to cover it. 

I'm shocked.

ABC, NBC, and CBS - Cronkite's old network - did not cover the president's speech. 

That's a shame.  Viewers who didn't watch Fox News that night missed the President tell the following lies:

[Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.

 

If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?

 

And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.

 

Yet, Saddam Hussein has chosen to build and keep these weapons despite international sanctions, U.N. demands, and isolation from the civilized world.

 

We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States.

 

We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.

 

We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.

 

To the contrary; confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.

 

Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction.

 

Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past.

 

Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

 

After eleven years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.

 

The situation could hardly get worse, for world security and for the people of Iraq. The lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power, just as the lives of Afghanistan's citizens improved after the Taliban.

Even as recently as a few months ago, I believed that the President might have actually believed his own bullshit, but not anymore.  He knew he was lying and stretching the truth, and much like Ann, he didn't care.

According to the New York Times, the major networks did not run Bush's speech because "the administration did not expressly ask them to."  And thus ended the We-Need-More-Discussion argument.

Uh, Ann, a president giving a speech is not a "discussion."

Among the constantly scrolling series of objections to disarming Saddam Hussein, liberals argued that al-Qaeda hated Saddam because he was a secularist, but also warned that if we attacked Iraq, al-Qaeda would retaliate with new terrorist attacks against America. 

This is a crucial point, so it's time for another reality interlude.  Saddam was, by Middle Eastern standards especially, a secularist.  He outlawed certain displays of religious fanaticism within Iraq and put a lot of effort into keeping any fundamentalists from threatening his rule.  It is well known that Saddam and Osama bin-Laden didn't trust each other.  The only concern was that, in the Middle East, it is not terribly uncommon for people who don't trust each other to become allies when they have a common enemy, but that's very far from the picture that was painted for us that Saddam and Osama were indistinguishable from each other.  I remember a barber telling me in mid-2003 that he believed that Saddam was probably hiding out with Osama, and someone else actually bet me that we'd find out that Saddam was behind 9/11.  How did we get to a point where people actually believed that nonsense?

 

The second part of this statement refers to the after-effects of attacking Iraq.  The linear thinking implicit in this criticism is that if al-Qaeda didn't like Saddam, then they wouldn't mind it if we sent our troops over there to invade.  This might have been true if we sent in an invasion force, captured Saddam, and then got right out.  But that was never the plan.  We fully intended to make this a nation building project, which was clearly the right thing to do, but we also had to be honest about the risks.  Maintaining a large military presence in that part of the world carried huge risks, and yes, it would have been nice to have a discussion about those risks.

 

The other strange part of this statement is that al-Qaeda doesn't need motivation to attack America.  They have plenty of that.  What they need are willing volunteers.  And stationing troops in a Muslim country is what enables al-Qaeda to convince people that we have nefarious plans and that people should risk their lives to fight us.  And apparently there's no greater way to convince people that you have nefarious plans than by actually having nefarious plans. 

They said Saddam Hussein was not the enemy because he wasn't a real Muslim. 

If this sentence actually made more sense, it would probably be a lie.  Saddam Hussein was never "the enemy."  He may have been "an enemy," but to so singularly focus on him was a serious mistake unto itself.

But they also said the terrorists weren't real Muslims.

And most Muslims agree.

They made the singular argument that only the rich clamored for war with Iraq because their children wouldn't fight it.* 

And when the children of the rich eventually do have to fight it, watch how quickly the war ends.

If only the rich were for the war, Central Park West and Amagansett would have been ablaze with war fever as peace marches swept through humble middle-class neighborhoods. 

The rich weren't the only ones supporting this war.  They were just some of the ones who enabled us to lie our way into it.

It was the effete rich who yearned for appeasement. 

Actually, it was the effete rich who published, promoted, and distributed this literary turd that you consider a serious polemic.

But it was touching to have liberals claiming to be worried about "our" fighting boys, inasmuch as the left had never shown themselves to be particularly enamored of the military before.* 

Like some of the other bloggers who have the stomach to actually read this crap, I'm a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  There are some movies that they've done on that show where you just hope that the creator of the movie was able to make enough money to get some therapy.  Here's my top five in that category:

  1. Hobgoblins

  2. Angel's Revenge

  3. Future War

  4. Soultaker

  5. Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

The reason I bring this up... well... it should be pretty obvious by now.

It would be enough if liberals would just pipe down a little the next time "our" fighting boys are caught pinching a few giggling drunks at Tailhook. 

This brings up some fascinating trivia.  As an attorney, Ann's most high profile case was representing a woman suing for sexual harassment.  And she also supported Paula Jones when she accused Clinton of harassment.  Intellectual consistency?  Why even pretend?

CNN's Judy Woodruff made the remarkable argument that Iraq was simply too small to attack.  In response to Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, Woodruff said, "Maybe I'm the only one here, but I'm still marveling at the notion that one-third of the president's State of the Union address was devoted to a country the size of California." 

Actually, it turned out that Iraq wasn't too small to attack, but it was too big to control with only enough soldiers to fill the stands at a NASCAR event. 

Who cares if Saddam was developing nukes to hand over to al-Qaeda?  Iraq doesn't have the square footage to rate!

Did Ann know that Saddam wasn't the only person in the entire country?  Actually, let me rephrase that, I know the answer to that.  Did any of Ann's readers know that?

In an amazing ruse, the left simultaneously blamed Israel and used Israel as an excuse not to take out Saddam Hussein. 

In an amazing ruse, Ann simultaneously blamed liberals and used liberals as an excuse not to take a responsible position on Iraq.

While secretly yearning for the extermination of Israel, liberals demanded that Bush resolve the Israel-Palestinian crisis "first."*

Yeah, I'm sure that the 68% of Jews in this country who vote Democratic were secretly yearning for the extermination of Israel.

Before taking out a lunatic developing nuclear weapons, liberals said, Bush would have to solve a problem that hadn't been solved in fifty years. 

Once again, the importance of a job is inversely proportional to how much patience is required.

Of course, if Iraq developed a nuclear bomb, the first victim would be an imperiled civil society of Jews. 

So now that Iran is in the same situation...

One way to get Yasser Arafat back to the bargaining table would have been to take out Saddam Hussein and eliminate a principle funding source for Palestinian terrorism.*

I almost want to count this one as two separate lies.  At the time, there was only one person that we could take out to get Yasser Arafat back to the bargaining table, and it was not Saddam.  It was Ariel Sharon.  And calling Saddam Hussein a principle funding source for Palestinian terrorism is a stretch.  The Iranians and Syrians own that distinction and have for a long time.

But liberals insisted the Israel-Palestinian problem had to be solved "first."

Actually, the Israel-Palestinian problem didn't need to be solved first, but it just needed to be addressed first.  Launching a serious effort there in 2002, when many rulers in that region were worried about homegrown terrorism making them the next target, would have convinced a lot of people in the region that the United States was truly interested in 'liberating' people.  Instead, our eventual invasion of Iraq was, not surprisingly, viewed with skepticism about our true motives.

When none of their other arguments worked, liberals would trot out their demands for "multilateralism," and U.N.ism, and working with "the allies."

And three months after we invaded Iraq, George Bush was begging the U.N. and other allies to help him clean up the mess he made.

The left's theory of a just war had evolved to (1) military force must never be deployed in America's self-interest; and (2) we must first receive approval from the Europeans, especially the Germans.* 

Actually, the left's theory of a just war is one that is based on facts, and the left's theory of whether we should actually fight it is based on whether it will make us safer, will protect American values, and when no other option is available to accomplish it.

Good thing we didn't have that rule in 1941.

If we had more people like Ann in 1941, the Germans could have gotten the support they needed for upholding Christian values in Europe.

Walter Cronkite considered it axiomatic that the United States would subject its survival to veto by the United Nations: "It is, I hope," he said, "the intention of the United States to take the matter to the United Nations and work with the United Nations." 

One of the great ironies of this time in American history is that we intended to promote democracy throughout the globe, but we intended to do it by bypassing and discrediting the closest thing we have to a democratic institution for the entire world.

Meanwhile, back at the U.N., they were issuing resolutions demanding that Britain repeal a law that allows parents to spank their children. 

I think they changed their minds after seeing this.

Cronkite appeared to fear that America would outlast him.* 

Believing that a revered news anchor has been secretly pining for the destruction of the country he's been reporting the news to is a clear sign of mental illness, right?

Peculiarly, Cronkite insisted upon agreement from "the other Arab nations." 

So he wanted the post-war nation building effort to be a success?  That traitor!

In the sort of meaningless pontification that enthralls Martha's Vineyard matrons, Cronkite said that without the support of other Arab nations "we might win a war and never establish a peace again with those people." 

He was so right, I can't even add to that.

In December 2001, Senator Tom Daschle, too, was demanding approval from the "Arab allies": "A strike against Iraq would be a mistake.  It would complicate Middle Eastern diplomacy....I think we have to keep the pressure on Iraq in a collective way, with our Arab allies.  Unilateralism is a very dangerous concept.  I don't think we should ever act unilaterally." 

Boy was he wrong!

How about Saddam Hussein?  Should we have gotten him in the "coalition" before taking action against Iraq?

Huh?  That doesn't even make sense as a joke.  Hell, that didn't even make sense as a joke in 2003 when she originally wrote this crap.

Assuredly, it would be better if the U.S. never had to go to war without a lot of allies. 

And even better if we didn't have to go to war at all.

It would be better if we could have precisely calibrated Saddam's progress in acquiring nuclear arms. 

Does anyone in this country actually know what U.N. weapons inspectors do?

It would also have been better if instead of greeting the Wehrmacht with open arms, the French had fought back.  It would have been better.  Be it so. 

It would also have been better if the people of Germany were able to stop a fascist war monger who railed against the press, liberals, and foreigners before he came to power.

We don't choose the circumstances in which we must exhibit our will as a nation.  This is the price of manhood - acting when you must and not complaining that someone might get hurt.

And when you're sitting at the bar, and some guy calls your mom a filthy ho, there's only one course of action.  You crack a beer bottle over his head and start throwing chairs.  That's how to settle things like a man.

Americans were solidly behind the president in fighting terrorism, so liberals went and sulked with their cheese-tasting friends. 

You know, I've been to many of the red states, and I could swear they had cheese there too.

They literally had to go to Europe to get extraterritorial votes for appeasement. 

A lot of people still don't fully understand why so many of us were up in arms over Ann Coulter's sunny portrayal in her TIME Magazine cover story.  The biggest problem was that writer John Cloud claimed that it was hard to find instances of her inaccuracies.  That's like Sports Illustrated putting Hulk Hogan on the cover as being a serious athletic competitor and claiming that it was hard to find instances that wrestling is fake. 

The demand for support from "the allies" was a classic political move:  Expand the electorate to include your political allies. 

Once again, the following sentence is real.  Please don't buy the book, but feel free to pull it off the shelf at your local bookstore and check it out, it's on page 218. 

That's why Republicans wanted to enfranchise blacks, prohibitionists wanted to enfranchise women, and Democrats want to enfranchise felons. 

Yes, she actually wrote that Republicans want to help black people vote.  Now granted, she's referring to the time around the Civil War, but it gives you a good idea of the lengths that this book went to blow smoke up the asses of Republicans.  Sadly, in today's America, because of a mainly Republican-led and extremely racist drug war, most of the felons that those Democrats want to enfranchise are black.

Indeed, the main opponents to the suffrage movement were liquor companies (apparently anticipating Mothers Against Drunk Driving). 

So women needed the right to vote to form Mothers Against Drunk Driving?  Huh?

So it's interesting that, when it came to America's self-defense, Democrats wanted to expand the electorate to Europeans. 

The saddest thing is that someone as cynical as Ann about increasing democracy throughout the world is nominated to be our ambassador to the United Nations.

The very idea of foreigners voting on America's national security is absurd. 

Not quite as absurd as thinking that only our nation's security is affected by aggressive tyrants.

How about getting them to vote on the country's smoking policies? 

Cigarettes?  No.  Pot?  Yes.

Public opinion in Europe was also for pogroms. 

And I'm sure that those pogroms were a result of whiny liberals campaigning for silly things like tolerance and peace.  Holy crap, she's a fucking retard.

Liberals were pimping for the most despicable people in Europe, demanding that these moral paragons be given a vote on America's national defense.

I can't imagine why people in Europe like China more than they like us.

The concept of "allies" had become rather elastic. 

If anyone understands that sentence, please email me.

We certainly didn't need countries like France for their military contributions. 

Unbeknownst to much of Bush country even today, the French anti-terrorism laws and policies have traditionally been the toughest and most effective of any European country.  But instead of looking at modern France...

The Warsaw Ghetto held off the Nazis almost as long as did the entire nation of France.

We looked at the France of 1940!

Perhaps they could supply our troops with their 265 brands of cheese. 

Actually, I see that 17.6 ounces of this cheese costs a mere $326.04.  The French could supply one of those per day to every American soldier (assuming an average of 150,000) serving in Iraq for the next ten years and it would still cost less than what we've spent there so far ($200 billion vs. $178.5 billion)

Still, Democrats were insistent that America had to give the Vichy government a veto over U.S. foreign policy. 

I can't imagine why.

We had Australia, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Qatar, Turkey, and Romania and dozens of others on our side. 

Don't forget Palau!

How many countries did we need? 

How about at least one where Arabic is spoken?  That would've helped.

Apparently, France and Germany.  Only then would it be a "multilateral coalition."

Actually, it would've been a "multilateral coalition" if all those other countries sent more than just a first-aid kit and gift basket.

Back in December 1998, when Clinton bombed Iraq to delay his impeachment, Democrats weren't particularly worried about what the "allies" would think. 

Are there really that many people who don't understand the difference between an air strike and a ground invasion?

Tom Daschle said, "This is a time to send Saddam Hussein as clear a message as we know how to send that we will not tolerate the broken promises and the tremendous acceleration of development of weapons that we've seen time and time again in Iraq." 

Wow, I wonder what Tom Daschle would've said if Saddam wasn't complying with the inspectors in early 2003.  From the U.N. report on March 7, 2003:

Inspections in Iraq resumed on 27 November 2002.  In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties and certainly much less than those that were faced by UNSCOM in the period 1991 to 1998.  This may well be due to the strong outside pressure.

Yet still today, it's not even rare to meet people who believe that Saddam kicked the inspectors out in 2003.

Madeleine Albright opposed war with Iraq in 1991 and 2003.  But she was solidly behind Clinton's impeachment bombing of Iraq, saying, "Month after month, we have given Iraq chance after chance to move from confrontation to cooperation, and we have explored and exhausted every diplomatic action.  We will see now whether force can persuade Iraq's misguided leaders to reverse course and to accept at long last the need to abide by the rule of law and the will of the world." 

Weird, I guess Secretary Albright does know the difference between an air strike and a ground invasion.  Show-off.

Only when we had a president who wanted to attack Iraq for purposes of national security, rather than his own self-interest, did Democrats think he was being rash. 

Or it may have been that we'd become stuck in a no-win situation trying to rebuild the country for decades.

Democrats are always hawks in the off-season.

Speaking of being a hawk in the off-season, please make sure you support Operation Yellow Elephant. 

Fortunately, Americans disagreed with the Democrats and overwhelmingly supported war with Iraq. 

Fortunately for Halliburton, I guess.

In the first six months of 2002, the ABC News - Washington Post Poll showed 72 percent supporting a U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

June 8, 2005 - ABC News - Washington Post Poll - 41%

The Fox News - Opinion Dynamics Poll also had 72 percent supporting it. 

March 31, 2005 - Fox News - Opinion Dynamics Poll - 64% approve of the war, which was worded "Do you approve or disapprove of the way the United States military is handling the post-war situation in Iraq?"   (emphasis mine, although the fact that the end of March, 2005 is the last time this, or any Iraq War popularity question, was asked in their poll should emphasize something else)

The Newsweek poll showed 68 percent in favor.  The least support for an attack came in an NBC News - Wall Street Journal Poll showing only 57 percent in favor of attacking Iraq. 

A few more polls here from June, 2005 - CNN/USA - 39% -  Gallup - 42%

It was a measure of how strong support was for war that the New York Times couldn't even produce some phony poll supporting its own evident desire to keep Saddam Hussein in power. 

That's funny, apparently this page had no problem locating their polls.  The New York Times started taking polls in the fall of 2002, which Ann even mentions later in this chapter.

(In 1984, about three months before Reagan would win forty-nine states in the largest electoral landslide in history, a Times columnist reported that Mondale "led President Reagan in a recent Gallup-Newsweek poll.")

Was that possibly right after the Democratic Convention, perhaps?  Although, this page shows that Mondale never led in the Gallup polling.  Would've been nice if Ann actually named the columnist though.  Sometimes I get the feeling that she doesn't want you to look this stuff up. 

Lugubrious over the vast public support in America for attacking Iraq, the media began doing push-polling for the House of Saud. 

After all this time, I'm still not sure whether Joe Q. Wingnut thinks the Saudis are "with us" or "with the terrorists?"  They are arguably the greatest example of how difficult it is to see the world in the stark black and white terms that Bush wants us to. 

ABC's World News Tonight optimistically reported that support for the war was "highly conditional, dropping below 50 percent when tougher questions are asked." 

It also dropped below 50 percent when people who had a basic knowledge of Middle East history were asked as well.

Support seemed to decline with such follow-up questions as these:

Suppose it were your daughter being sent to war and she would be horribly raped and maimed and disfigured by Iraqi forces.  Do you support going to war NOW?

If it meant calamitous casualties and total humiliation for the U.S., then would you STILL support war?

Should America go out into the shivering world all alone or would it be better to have our dearly beloved allies on board?

And now that some of those bad things have happened, support for the war has dropped under 50 percent.  Strange that.

Even with their idiotic poll questions, the media could not suppress support for war, so they generally dispensed with polls altogether and ran ludicrous man-on-the-street interviews instead. 

Some of the items that Ann brings up in this section are interesting because, factually, Americans did strongly support going into Iraq, even though anyone with even a basic knowledge of the Middle East knew it would likely be a train wreck.  A lot of journalists admittedly lost touch with their impartiality, which for consistency sake, I can't support, but as a human being, I can understand.  It's like when conservatives complain about how reporters like Michael Ware in Iraq can meet with insurgents but not provide information to the U.S. forces that would help us capture them.  As a human being, it would be easy for him to rationalize it, but it would impede his ability to fully perform his duties as a reporter there.  I'm impressed by how some of the very best journalists handle their role as impartial observer, but also disheartened many times by how many let their personal motivations affect their work.

Amazingly, all the random Americans interviewed by the New York Times were firmly opposed to war with Iraq. 

This was mainly because the people who supported the war were too busy plotting to blow up the New York Times building to talk to them.

This allowed the Times to run breathtakingly dishonest headlines in a country burning with war fever, such as, "Backing Bush All the Way, Up to but Not into Iraq." 

Burning with war fever?  Is that supposed to be a good thing?

The media love these unrepresentative, dishonest man-on-the-street interviews because they can present 100 percent of the defeatist case against war without anyone ever being able to quote them. 

And they love it even more now because they can point back to it and say that they were trying to show both sides at a time where we were 'burning with war fever.'

In October 2002, ABC's Peter Jennings proclaimed that the "country appears to be less confident than the President" about the war with Iraq. 

Today, the only person more confident than the President about Iraq is the Vice President.

Jennings's assessment was based on interviews by the New York Times, everyone consulted by ABC happened to oppose the war, offering such important insights as "I'm frightened." 

Coincidentally, that was also their reaction to reading this book.

ABC's Bill Redecker summed up the prevailing mood of the nation, saying, "Contrary to what the President says, when it comes to war, America does not speak with one voice." 

On February 15, 2003, I participated in a peace rally for the first time in my life.  Like most of those who marched through downtown Seattle that day, I found myself baffled and disappointed with what was starting to seem like an unstoppable plunge into the abyss of blind nationalism that has taken down many a great nation.  What I remember most was at the beginning of the rally, there was an older man walking around with a sign that just said, "It will be a quagmire."  That's all.  No slogan, no slam on the President, just the pure, unvarnished truth.  There may have been a lot of people who supported this fiasco, but it was certainly newsworthy that those who opposed it were so motivated to stand up that day and say so.  And two and a half years later, everyone should know why.

Maybe not, but sixty-seven percent is about as close as it ever gets.

Well, unless you count the support for our invasion of Afghanistan.

In a country of almost 300 million people, liberals get seven men to issue an opinion from the Supreme Court and they want the rest of us to shut up about abortion forevermore. 

Actually, we don't want you shut up as much as we don't want you to encroach upon our civil liberties. 

But before going to war to eliminate a potential nuclear threat, we need to convince every last American that war is necessary. 

And even if you can pull that off, if the war doesn't make us safer, it still wasn't necessary.  Kind of makes you look like an idiot for writing all this crap, Ann, don't it?

Liberals seem to believe total unanimity is possible from watching Iraqi elections. 

Put on your raincoats people, the shit is about to be piled real high here.

Reporting on an election in Iraq in which Saddam Hussein won 99.96 percent of the vote, ABC's David Wright said, "It is impossible to say whether that's a true measure of the Iraqi people's feelings."  Really?  Impossible to say? 

A news reporter said something stupid?  I'm shocked!

ABC knew exactly how "the country" feels about war with Iraq ("less confident than the President") but were unsure about the accuracy of an election in which Saddam Hussein won 99.96 percent of the vote.

I guess the only thing stupider than that would be believing that we'd be able to quickly set up a democracy there.

Finally, after nine months of the media's demoralization techniques, the Times took its first poll in September 2002, asking Americans if they supported the war with Iraq. 

Yes, demoralization techniques such as repeating the President's bullshit and making up phony intelligence to support the war.

Sixty-eight percent supported war, and only 24 percent were opposed. 

June, 2005 - CBS News/New York Times - 37%

The headline was "Poll Finds Unease on Terror Fight and Concerns About War on Iraq." 

So an approximately 50 million Americans were opposed to a war in which many of their family members and friends could die, and that's not characterized as "unease" and "concern?"

One month later, the Times again polled Americans on support for military action against Iraq.  Again, 67 percent of Americans favored a U.S. invasion to depose Saddam Hussein and only 27 percent were opposed. 

It's amazing how much changed between September and October of 2002.

This time, the headline was "Public Says Bush Need to Pay Heed to Weak Economy." 

And according to this poll from October 2002, 63% of Americans said that George Bush could be doing more to improve economic conditions.

An editorial about the poll the next day was titled "A Nation Wary of War." 

It would not be the last time we saw that headline.

The Times characterized a poll that showed 67 percent of Americans in favor of war with Iraq as showing the country was "reluctant" to go to war and "uncertain how best to deal with Iraq." 

Now this is where I have to agree that statistically, we weren't reluctant as a nation on waging this war.  It will go down as one of the saddest chapters in our nation's history, but we happily brought this mess upon ourselves.  America will recover, it always does, but sadly we're going to have to learn some harsh lessons first.  Starting with Karl Rove, who like Ann, will eventually learn that the "blame liberals" game only goes so far until people realize that you're just full of hot air blaming others for the mistakes that you've cheered on.

That's if you didn't count the two-thirds who wanted to attack. 

And speaking of those people, I have some advice for the left today.  Do your best not to talk down to those people.  If recent polling is accurate, about 40% of those people now realize that they were wrong.  Working in the high-tech industry, my Reload colleagues and I use the expression "flip the bozo bit" to describe that point in time where you decide that a certain person doesn't quite cut it technically.  It's a bad habit as no one is perfect and people have different skills and conditioning that goes into the things they do.  Not everyone studies the Middle East and not everyone can tell when they're being lied to, especially when people who write successful books and widely read columns repeat those lies.  You can, and should, be angry at those in our government and in the media who should have known better, but this is a good opportunity for all of us to build some bridges again with people who had previously been convinced that us liberals were full of shit.  I flipped the bozo bit on them too, but it shouldn't be permanent.

When liberals get a poll result they like, they instantly seize on it to demand that the entire country "move on." 

Subtle.

But when they get a poll result they don't like, it means we need to have a national discussion. 

Actually, I think it was the fact that we were going to start a war that warranted the discussion.

The editorial said Bush "still has work to do if he hopes to persuade Americans of the need to use military force to disarm Iraq."  Sixty-seven percent! 

Think of the amount of work he has to do now.

Do we have to have 100 percent approval before defending America's security?

Nope, we just need a strategy that will actually work.

Of course, it is impossible to have 100 percent support for defending America because some Americans are liberals. 

From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo on February 5, 2003:

A good friend of mine who is terribly shrewd about foreign policy, and opposes an Iraq war from a foreign policy realist perspective, tells me that the problems in North Korea could be one of the consequences. The idea is that our hyperfocus on Iraq distracted us from our responsibilities in Asia, got us into this jam, and now keeps us floundering in it. Somehow though that just doesn't quite add up. I mean, I know it's supposed to be hard to fight two, simultaneous regional wars, as our war-fighting doctrine still envisions. But should it really be so hard to fight two simultaneous diplomatic offenses?

Yeah, it sure sounds like these folks who wanted to have a discussion don't care about defending America.

Journalists in particular simply could not make a psychological connection between America's defeat and their dying. 

And the neoconservatives simply could not make the obvious connection between their hair-brained schemes and a continual flow of American soldiers dying.

National Public Radio reporter Nina Totenberg described Saddam Hussein as a personal bugaboo of the president. 

After Saddam was captured, apparently the gun he was holding made it back to the White House, where President Bush liked to show it off.  Personal bugaboo?  Nah.

Of Bush's focus on Saddam Hussein, she said, "Maybe...one ought not pick one's targets based, at least in part, on who tried to kill one's dad." 

That reminds me, how did the line, "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die," not make this list of the 100 greatest movie quotes?

Maureen Dowd also viewed war with Iraq as merely a grudge match for the president, saying Bush had left "poor Tony Blair to make the case against his foes for him, and treat[ed] policy disagreements as personal slights" (emphasis added). 

Even more emphasis was added after this memo came out.

Saddam Hussein is merely Bush's personal foe. 

Another thing I have say to the left, and I know this will generate some groans, but lay the hell off of Tom Friedman.  Yes, he was a complete idiot for believing that Bush would be able to lie his way into Baghdad and still make this misadventure work, but From Beirut to Jerusalem was arguably the biggest reason why I understood enough to confidently say in early 2003 that this war would be a disaster.  One of the main points in that book was that the Middle East remains mired in an historical time capsule because leaders are always looking to settle old scores rather than look to the future.  This was exactly what Bush was doing, and even though I'll never understand why Friedman himself couldn't see that, I don't think we should permanently "flip the bozo bit" on him just yet.  He gets it when he doesn't let his unbridled optimism get in the way of his enormous and goofy mustache.

Liberals so adored Islamic terrorists they assumed the feeling was mutual.* 

Kiss my ass, Ann.  Seriously, just fucking kiss it.

After 9-11, college dropout Michael Moore indignantly wrote, "If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him!  Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes' destination of California - these were places that voted against Bush!  Why kill them?"

Uh, Ann, I think Michael Moore is making the point that the terrorists weren't getting back at Bush.  Terrorists don't really see Americans as liberals and conservatives.  They see us as Americans.  Newt Gingrich and Ted Kennedy look exactly the same to them.

There were other subtle hints that the media were not keen on America. 

It's not their job to be keen on America, it's their job to report the truth.

The New York Times was in a rapture when it discovered that nine days after September 11, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes had sent a letter to the Bush White House recommending we get rough with the terrorists. 

With a target audience of American conservatives, I can't imagine why he would want us to start wars.  It's not like war coverage boosts ratings among that demographic. 

This was even bigger than Enron:  A highly placed member of the news establishment wanted America to win the war on terrorism. 

Uh, no.  He only wanted us to get rough with the terrorists.  And as we've seen with the war on drugs, "getting rough" with people is counterproductive when dealing with individual, psychologically-addictive, self-destructive behavior.  Getting rough does not equal winning.  It only equals high ratings for Brit Hume and the ability to incorporate cool fighter jet graphics into the intros for your news shows.

As far as the Times was concerned, Ailes's recommendation that harsh measures be taken against the terrorists was the smoking gun of partisanship. 

It sounds like a convincing point if you forget all the lying and propagandizing that went along with it.

The paper railed that Ailes purports to be an "unbiased journalist, not a conservative spokesman." 

And they were right.

Fox News is "the self-proclaimed fair and balanced news channel." 

Yeah, sure.

But now the Times had caught him red-handed, pursuing "an undisguised ideological agenda." 

As did almost everyone else in the country smart enough not to believe everything a news anchor tells them.

Ailes was rooting for America! 

And that's a bias!  As honorable it is to root for America, that's not his job!  His job is to report the news!  How can you be fair and balanced if you're rooting for something?  Everyone in this country roots for America, but the best journalists are the ones who can keep that emotion separate from their work in order to be accurate.  And when those journalists do their jobs, we're all better informed, and that's how America wins.

It's so obvious that liberals root against their own country that it didn't even occur to anyone at the Times that its attack on Ailes's "partisanship" had given up the ghost on their faux patriotism. 

But in reality, it was so obvious that Fox News propagandizes that it didn't even occur to Ann Coulter that her attack on the New York Times had given up the ghost on her faux credibilty.

At least we finally had it from the horse's mouth.

And thanks to the spectacularly retarded Scott Norvell, so do we.

 

Interesting side node:  I once got in a brief angry email exchange with Scott Norvell after I emailed him that he should write a Tongue Tied entry (his project documenting political correctness) about Bill O'Reilly getting Ludacris booted from his Pepsi contract.  Fair and balanced?  Try the other news outlets.

Lawyers did their part for America, too, quickly changing their letterhead from anti-impeachment slogans to anti-war slogans. 

Man, it would not surprise me in the least if I see Ann locked up in an insane asylum one day.  This woman is flat out crazy. 

On the "Law Professors for the Rule of Law" webpage, you could read either the professors' indignation about war with Iraq or their indignation about the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. 

I can't find a "Law Professors for the Rule of Law" webpage anywhere, but here's some idiocy from the archives of a real law professor's blog in the run-up to war (when we wasn't just linking to things that other people were writing):

Week ending 3/8/03 - I really don't think that these guys [France and Germany] realize how much damage they're doing, mostly to themselves and to institutions that they need.

 

A LOT OF PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK that Bush's comments last night about Iraq being a threat to the United States and its neighbors were merely policy justifications.  But they're also laying the groundwork for justifying an attack on Iraq, even without Security Council approval, as self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. Many among the international-law professoriate will opine that this isn't enough -- but that's only one opinion, and one that has little credibility given that the organizing principle of the international-law professoriate and commentariat [?] sometimes seems to be "whatever the United States wants to do is against the law."
 

MORE SUPPORT for Steven Den Beste's theory that the French are trying to prop up Saddam for fear of what we'll learn about their dealings with him once he falls

 

Week ending 3/1/03 - SUSPECTED AL QAEDA LEADER Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan.
That's excellent news, and another nail in the coffin of the "Iraq is distracting from the war on Al Qaeda" theory.
 

LOOKS LIKE AN INDEPENDENT KURDISH REPUBLIC just got a bit more likely:

An independent Kurdish republic is okay with me. If the Turks don't like it, well, then they're playing a dangerous game.

Playing a dangerous game, huh?  OK, Cletus. 

 

Back to Ann...

Also performing a vital service for America, on the first night of the war in Afghanistan, the Army's lawyer instructed the U.S. military not to shoot Talibanist Mullah Omar. 

If we did that, we wouldn't be able to torture him at Gitmo.

Reportedly, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld found out about this, he kicked in a glass door.

I think I finally know why he hasn't been fired yet. 

 

"You tell him."

"No, you tell him."

Even for a naturally gaseous body, Democrats in Congress outdid themselves with their palaver about Iraq. 

Here's Ted Kennedy outdoing himself on January 29, 2003:

I voted against that resolution and war with Iraq because I was not persuaded that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our national security, and because of my belief that war with Iraq, especially without broad international support, would undermine our ability to meet the gravest threat to our national security - terrorism against the United States by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Circumstances have changed significantly since Congress approved that resolution last October. In the months that have passed, events have only strengthened my belief that this is the wrong war at the wrong time.

Hot air, huh?

Unlike the typical liberal cocktail party pedant, members of Congress would have to vote on Iraq - and then run for reelection. 

It never ceases to amaze me how the stereotypes of conservatives that existed when I was growing up in the 80s have all of a sudden become liberal stereotypes.  Apparently, all the wealthy conservatives out there no longer have cocktail parties like they used to.

After spending the summer of 2002 yapping about how Bush had to consult Congress before invading Iraq, when Bush went to Congress for a war resolution, the Democrats got huffy at Bush for consulting them. 

Imagine how mad they would have been if they knew how much they were being lied to as well.

Democrats were chafing at having to pretend they supported America.* 

Ann, you ignorant slut!  (It had to make its way into this, sorry) 

 

For anyone who doesn't remember this time, they were actually chafing at the fact that supporting a potentially disastrous war was seen by many of their constituents as "supporting America."

But they didn't want to have to say so until after the November elections. 

This actually should have been helpful for the Democrats in nominating a quality candidate, but sadly, it didn't. 

Democrats didn't think it was too close to an election to be switching Senate candidates in New Jersey, but it was definitely too close for a vote on Iraq.

Yeah, deciding whether to go to war is a trivial matter compared to deciding on a candidate for Congress.

On Meet the Press, Senator Hillary Clinton objected to having a vote on a war resolution before the elections, saying, "I don't know that we want to put it in a political context." 

How dare she question this President's right to use war as a political football?!?

Yes, it would be an insult for politicians to have to inform the voters how they stand on important national security issues before an election. 

I guess the only way for a voter to find out a Congressional candidate's position is for them to have a vote.

Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the Democrats would not have enough information to make an informed decision on Iraq - until January. 

And almost three years later, no one in charge of our government still has yet to make an informed decision on Iraq.

Even the press laughed at that one.

Well, if you consider Townhall.com the press.  And I don't.

Senator Bob Byrd (D-KKK) tut-tutted the need for a resolution on Iraq, saying September 11 was "over a year old." 

I have to admit, I'm not sure I can ever get past Robert Byrd's past.  I will never be able to consider him a great American the way many are able to these days.  Maybe I'm too harsh on people who take a long time to understand the inherent equality of humanity across all races and religions.  But the bottom line is that he was right about the war, and he was one of the few people in our government sure enough of that to stand up to everyone and say it.  I think the fact that he became the voice of reason in the Senate says a lot more about the Senate, then it does to convince me to forget the Senator's past.

What's the big hurry?  Why is it so imminent?  Why here and how?  Why before the election? 

Why not do something that would make America safer instead?

But back on August 30, 2002, Senator Byrd was denouncing Bush for allegedly bypassing Congress before taking action against Iraq.  "Congress needs to act and vote," he said.  "There needs to be a vote in Congress."

Oh, my.  Ann has to know not to go down this path, right? 

 

Nope.

Byrd said he had contacted "constitutional scholars, recognized constitutional scholars," and every one - "to the man and woman" - said the president was required "to ask the Congress for permission and to get authorization, new authorization to invade Iraq." 

It's truly amazing how Ann can wrap herself in the flag and take a dump on the Constitution all at the same time.

The vain, ranting windbag of a kleptocrat said Bush should stop reading polls "and read this: the Constitution of the United States." 

And if Bush actually cared, he would discover that only Congress can Declare War.

(Historical note: President Nixon was so enraged by the Senate Democrats' rejection of his Supreme Court nominees on the grounds that they were "mediocre," he toyed with the idea of nominating Byrd so he could really show them mediocre.)

(Historical note:  President Nixon was an anti-Semite who resigned from the Presidency in disgrace)

In addition to the indignity of having to vote on a national security issue in an election year, Byrd said that the resolution on Iraq was diverting attention from more important issues. 

Most importantly, the war on terror.

Worse than "despicable," Byrd said Saddam Hussein was "lower than a snake's belly." 

How dare he use an expression that would sound folksy in the red states!

And that's why it was very important that we do nothing.* 

Well, at least nothing that will cause America to become seen as less of a moral authority than China in 3 years.

Imminent military action to remove a despot who longed for a mushroom cloud over the nation's capital was crowding out the big stuff like naming another building in West Virginia after Bob Byrd.

I wonder how many buildings in Iraq will be named after Ann.

It was openly acknowledged that the Democrats opposed the war resolution, but that politics would force many of them to fake support for war with Iraq. 

The vote to authorize war in the fall of 2002 was disappointing in that it potentially could have stopped this disaster, but it was never the focus of too much anger for me at the time, and even now.  Having a unified front to persuade Saddam to obey the U.N. inspections process was necessary, and that was a strong justification for voting yes to authorize military action as a way to make it clear that we were serious about war if Saddam was evading inspectors.  Now, strategic idealism aside, most Democrats, and myself, knew that Bush wasn't interested in either diplomacy or avoiding war, and therefore a vote authorizing war was simply a vote for the war to happen.  And that's exactly what happened.  Saddam didn't evade the inspections at all, but we watched the Bush team lie and mislead continually about Saddam's cooperation in order to still justify going in there.  Democrats in Congress were truly caught between a rock and a hard place on this, and that's why I don't buy that there's this big divide between the ones who voted differently on this.  Arguably, a smarter course of action would have been to hold off on voting yes for authorizing war until there was a more complete plan in place for both post-war Iraq and dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but I guess my bar for what to expect from our Senators is pretty damn low. 

CNN's Judy Woodruff told Ted Kennedy that some Democrats "are privately saying they are supporting the president, because they think it will hurt them politically if they go up against the president on this.  They'll look unpatriotic." 

How on Earth did that happen, Ann?

Kennedy agreed, saying there was "nothing terribly unusual" about politicians voting their "own political interests." 

A shocking revelation!

Peter Beinart of the New Republic said the Democrats in Congress were "terrified politically." 

Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty accurate description of the feeling you'd have knowing that a vote one way will lead to getting booted from office and the other way will lead to a disastrous war.

He said many would vote for a war resolution "in the end" but that "in their heart of hearts, I think a lot of Democrats are opposed, but they don't have the intellectual self-confidence to actually come out and say so."

Many people would replace the words "intellectual self-confidence" with "balls," but I agree with Beinart.

Indeed, liberals were constantly admitting that it was the Democrat position to root against America.* 

Karl Rove's recent comments in New York about the "liberal" reaction to 9/11 were offensive enough on their own, but what is even more insulting is this continual effort to claim one day that when they say "liberals," they're only referring to a small number of anti-American fanatics, and the next day use the term interchangeably with the term Democrats. 

The New York Times reported: "Democratic congressmen who are visiting Iraq this week stirred up anger among some Republicans when they questioned the reasons President Bush has used to justify possible military action against Iraq." 

You'll never guess how Ann interprets this.

Only Republicans were annoyed?  Weren't any Democrats the tiniest bit irritated that members of Congress were meeting with a tyrant as the U.S. prepared to attack him? 

Psst, Ann.  You were still supposed to be pretending that there were ways to avoid war, remember?

It is simply axiomatic that only Republicans would be irritated by treason.* 

I'm not really an expert on the legal matters involved here, but I'd have to think that accusing so many members of our government of treason would somehow be grounds for a libel case or something.  Does anyone know?

The raison d'etre of the Democratic Party demands the anti-war position.*

This isn't even consistent with the beginning of the chapter when she complained that Democrats liked wars that didn't make us safer.  What a cesspool of failed reasoning this chapter has devolved into.

In the final vote, Republicans overwhelmingly supported the war resolution against Iraq. 

The courage that must have taken.

Forty-eight Senate Republicans voted for the resolution and only one voted against (Lincoln Chafee). 

What the hell will it take for Lincoln Chafee to switch parties, or at least become an Independent?  Do they actually have to physically harm him in some way before the light bulb goes off over his head and he realizes, "Hey, wait a second, these people are destroying America's credibility, trashing the Constitution, and they consider me a traitor.  Maybe I should disassociate myself from them."

In the House, the vote was similarly lopsided, Republicans supporting the war by 215 to 6. 

Those 6 were given wedgies during recess.

House Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the Iraq resolution, voting 126 to 81 against. 

An overwhelming 61%.

In the Senate, where all members expect to run for president someday, the Democrats were split, with a slight majority voting in favor (29-21). 

How prophetic, one of those members did vote for the war and did run for President.  And guess what, the right still found ways to call him a traitor. 

The Democratic Party simply could not rouse itself to battle.

Don't remind me.

But don't call them unpatriotic. 

That's good advice, you don't want to sound stupid.

That makes them testy. 

And it makes you an idiot.

Democrats believe they should be allowed to attack Bush relentlessly on foreign policy, but that it is outrageous for anyone to mention their stand on foreign policy. 

Ann is presumably referring to when she mentions that their stand on foreign policy involves wishing for America's defeat.  I'll forgive the Democrats characterizing that as "outrageous."

Gore said Bush's foreign policy "will damage our ability to win the war on terrorism" and "will weaken our ability to lead the world." 

Holy cow, this Gore guy should really run for president.  He's so much smarter than the guy we have in there now.

If any Republican says the same thing about Democrats, all hell breaks loose. 

Speaking of all hell breaking loose, I believe the Republicans can accomplish that quite well without the Democrats having to do much of anything.

As Chambers said, innocence does not utter outraged shrieks, guilt does.

Well, at least that's what the interrogators at Gitmo keep saying.

Then - House minority leader Richard Gephardt bitterly criticized Vice President Dick Cheney for "saying that our nation's security efforts would be stronger if a Republican candidate for Congress were elected."  Well wouldn't it? 

Has Dick Cheney been right about anything he's said in the last 5 years?

When Senate Democrats refused to pass a Homeland Security bill unless it included the standard federal government proviso prohibiting incompetent workers from being fired, President Bush criticized the Democrats, saying they were "more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people." 

This would be the same Homeland Security plan that Republicans had to be kicked dragging and screaming to support.

This was absolutely factually correct:  The Democrats wanted standard civil service protections (special interests) to trump having competent workers at the Homeland Security Department (the security of the American people). 

And as you know, workers with no standard civil service protections are always the most effective at keeping us safe because they're already angry about their jobs and will take that out on the terrorists.  Retard.

Looking like an angry squirrel, then - Senate majority leader Tom Daschle marched to the Senate floor and passionately denounced George Bush for making a indisputably true statement. 

Like an angry squirrel?  Did someone drop some LSD in Ann's Kool-Aid?

"You tell those who fought in Vietnam and in World War II they're not interested in the security of the American people!  That is outrageous!  That is outrageous!" 

Sorry Tom, only the Republicans.  The Democrats who were risking their lives in those wars were traitors compared to the Republicans back home who supported it, but never had to go fight it.  You see, in Ann Coulter's America, you measure a war hero by how much he supports a war, not by how much he's willing to risk his life for it.

Democrats were beside themselves with indignation when they heard Karl Rove planned to raise the Republicans' demonstrable superiority on national security as a campaign issue. 

That's nothing.  You should see how angry they are now that he's still blaming them for all of the Bush Administration's mistakes.

Inasmuch as vast majorities of Americans consistently rank Republicans as better on national defense, Rove evidently believed this was an argument that would resonate with voters.

This was evidently not a long term plan for the Republicans.

At least when Republicans "politicize" the war, you know which side they're on. 

Yeah, they're on the Republican side.

Republicans were for war with Iraq. 

Wow!  Ann said something that is 100% true!

The Democrats pretended to support the war when they were forced to vote before the November elections, but then instantly started in with their Neville Chamberlain foot-dragging. 

There is no one from this time who will be seen as a Neville Chamberlain more than the current Prime Minister of Britain.  Tony Blair knew that Bush was driving himself into disaster in Iraq and believed that he'd be able to grab the wheel at some point and start driving.  What a complete fool.  The lack of backbone displayed by many Democrats at this time is nothing compared to how spineless Tony Blair was in not using his position to put the pressure on Bush to at least do this more responsibly. 

In a sea of umbrellas, they said they were for peace in our time. 

If you're wondering, I have no clue why she wrote "in a sea of umbrellas."  Was it symbolism?  Was it raining the day she wrote this?  No idea.

As President Abraham Lincoln said during the Civil War, the Democrats can "nominate a Peace Democrat on a War Platform or a War Democrat on a Peace Platform and I personally can't say that I much care which they do."

A lot of readers in the Confederate states are scratching their heads right now. 

Democratic presidential candidate and senator John Kerry voted for the war and then gave a major policy address months later, saying, "Mr. President, do not rush to war!" 

How dare someone who was brave enough to fight in a war give advice to someone who was not.

Rush to war?  We had been talking about that war for over a year and it had been three months since Kerry duly recorded his vote in favor of the war. 

Three months is hardly enough time to plan for occupying a country of 25 million people with few allies, install a new government, maintain the oil industry and infrastructure, and build permanent military bases.  Unless of course, you decide to go in there without a plan.  Then three months is enough time.

Evidently, Kerry had learned his lesson from the 1991 Gulf War. 

So had Saddam, but that didn't seem to matter to anyone.

Kerry had voted against the former President Bush's war with Iraq, saying that the country was "not yet ready for what it will witness and bear if we go to war." 

One of the most entertaining idiots over the past few years has been Chris Hitchens.  The line above reminded me of one of my favorite Hitchens columns.

Having been taunted for that vote ever since, in 2002 Kerry made sure to vote in favor of war with Iraq - allowing the New York Times to call him a "moderate" - before he began attacking it.

I'm amazed at how often I have to explain this to people who challenge the fact that I consider myself a moderate, but a moderate is not necessarily a centrist.  A moderate is simply the opposite of an extremist.  You can be a moderate and still belong to a party, but as a member of that party, you counteract the extremist elements.  I think it's necessary for the survival of a political party for the moderates to be in charge, and when I look to see which party is better for my country, I look at the party that is being more moderate.  Today, that's the Democrats, and until the moderates in the Republican Party are able to hose down their extremists, I'll be voting with the donkeys for many years to come.

Kerry explained his attack on a war he had voted for, saying he thought a resolution authorizing the president to use force against Iraq meant that the United Nations would have to approve. 

Foolish man, thinking that when he authorized the use of force, that Bush would actually be interested in using that power wisely.  He knew W from college, c'mon!

He claimed he was foursquare behind disarming Saddam Hussein, but not "until we have exhausted the remedies available, built legitimacy and earned the consent of the American people, absent, of course, an imminent threat requiring urgent action." 

On the other hand, Bush didn't care if we ended up stuck in Iraq for decades.  We had to go now!

Liberals believe all the results are in on global warming, but the situation in Iraq consistently required further study. 

It's actually not the liberals who believe all the results are in on global warming, it's the scientists.

By the time a threat from Islamic terrorists is "imminent," Chicago will be gone. 

Islamic terrorists?  I thought we were talking about Saddam? 

 

And speaking of cities being gone, not only are we more threatened because of Iraq, but because this administration is still digging its head in the sand about global warming, a lot of coastal cities are more threatened as well.

This was the fundamental problem of the anti-war Democrats. 

The fundamental problem was that we could see that car speeding over the cliff and could do nothing to stop it.

They couldn't bring themselves to say it was a mistake to depose Saddam Hussein, and "don't hurry" was not much of a rallying cry.

A lot of people are bringing themselves to say it today.

Dianne Feinstein said she voted for the resolution assuming it meant we would invade only if "our allies" approved. 

Little did she know that Colin Powell's mouth was taped shut at Cabinet meetings.

Joe Biden made the terrific argument that if we didn't wait for U.N. approval, it would "make a mockery of the efficacy of the U.N." 

That is a terrific argument.  And now, the U.N. has no desire to bail us out of this mess.

Perhaps the United Nations should have been more worried about that eventuality than we should. 

Oh, they were.

Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the war resolution - and never had another kind word to say for the war. 

And so did millions of Americans. 

Months after her vote, Senator Clinton gave an interview on Irish TV in which she said she opposed precipitous action against Iraq.  Hillary had not objected to precipitous action against Iraq when her husband bombed it on the day of his scheduled impeachment. 

Let me explain this as easily as I can.  An air raid involves a small group of Air Force personnel flying bombing missions on predefined targets.  A ground invasion involves several hundred thousand troops who physically travel on the ground into a country.  If someone can't figure out the difference in severity between the two, they shouldn't be getting involved in politics.  There's enough on TV that caters to these people to keep them entertained, like Jerry Springer and cartoons.  Just keep them away from Fox News Channel.

That bombing raid was preceded by calm deliberation.

What a pussy that Clinton guy was.  Any type of military action should be preceded by pounding your fist on the table and kicking in a glass door.

Aren't we entitled to ask:  Did the Democrats support the war or didn't they?

You're entitled to ask that, and I'm entitled to reply that oversimplifying this complex issue was what allowed it to become the thorough disaster we have now.

Why didn't they defend it?

Because they saw a losing strategy and wanted to actually do something that would protect America.  How the hell was this so hard for people on the right to figure out?

Those Democrats wanted to have it both ways.  If the war went well - a lot of them voted for the war with Iraq, didn't they? 

No, they voted for Bush to have the authority to wage war if it became necessary.

But if the war did not go well, many of the very Democrats who voted for the war resolution had emerged as leading spokesmen for the anti-war position. 

It's almost a little surprising to see Ann actually consider the possibility of the war going poorly.  A lot of those on the right couldn't even imagine a scenario where the U.S. would not be a wildly popular liberating force that would radically transform the Middle East into Orange County by the fall of 2003.

That would be a real asset if the war went badly.  On the eve of battle, Democrats were staking their political futures on the hope that their own country would falter.

Meanwhile, Bush staked his political future on trying to occupy the center of the Muslim world without a realistic plan.  It wasn't hope, Ann.  It was expectation.

In the Democrats' worst-case scenario, the United States would be acting precipitously to remove a ruthless dictator who tortured his own people. 

It also turned out to be the Republicans' worst-case scenario as well.

It's not as if anyone was worried we were making a horrible miscalculation and were about to depose the Iraqi Abraham Lincoln. 

Ann really had no idea that there were people other than Saddam Hussein in this country.  This is just George Bush out to see a man about a horse.

(Although Baath party legend has it that a young Saddam once trudged twenty miles round-trip through the snow to rape and dismember a woman.) 

Through the snow?  What, was that the winter he spent in Quebec?

Either we were removing a dictator who had current plans to fund terrorism against Americans or - if Bush were completely wrong and Eleanor Clift were completely right - we were removing a dictator who planned to kill and terrorize a lot of people, but not Americans specifically. 

Actually, we were creating a terrorist training camp the size of California.  But Ann was content just thinking about one day seeing Saddam in a jail cell.  How cute.

The Democrats did not merely question which was which, but were hysterically opposed to war.

And Ann is an expert on hysterical.

They thought the important thing was to figure out why foreigners hate us. 

And thanks to Iraq, we have a lot more of them who we can ask.

Gore said Bush had made the "rest of the world" angry at us.  Boo hoo hoo. 

Was the first draft of this book written in crayon?

Stewing over the "profound and troubling change in the attitude of the German electorate toward the United States," Gore ruefully said that the German-American relationship was in "a dire crisis."  Alas, the Germans hated us.

Non-Sequitir Break:  I was in Germany in the summer of 2003, and I was drinking beer during one of those massive festivals where there's row after row of tables lined up in the square.  Some guy who looked like Jim Haslett started yelling something in German, threw his beer down, and tried to flip over the table.  It all happened right near theher and me and this group of Australian kids that we didn't know.  To this day, I don't think anyone knows what that guy was mad about. 

That same night, James Carville read from the identical talking points on CNN's Crossfire:  "The Koreans hate us.  Now the Germans - you know that's one against Germany.  You know what?  You know what?  If we had a foreign policy that tried to get people to like us, as opposed to irritating everybody in the damn world, it would be a lot better thing." 

Do that many people really believe that it's a smart foreign policy to actively make enemies?  I mean, this is arguably the most amazing result of the dumbing down of America.  We actually believe that we'll be more secure if we're hated.

Perhaps we could get Djibouti to like us if we legalized clitorectomies for little girls.

That won't work, I guess we'll just have to invade them.

According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the root cause of the world's hatred for America was Kyoto:  "The unilateralist message the Bush team sent from its first day in office - get rid of the Kyoto climate treaty, forget the biological treaty, forget arms control, and if the world doesn't like it that's tough - has now come back to haunt us." 

One more reason we should be nicer to Tom Friedman.  People on the right think he's a liberal. 

Instead of looking into the root causes of Islamic lunacy, how about looking into the root causes of manly patriotism? 

Uh, Ann, it's pretty much the same thing.

Why are liberals so loath of positive testosterone? 

Oh my god, she really doesn't see the hypocrisy here.  Did she think that Saddam and his ruling thugs were dainty and effeminate?  I know he wears a beret, but that sentence just took this chapter to another level of stupidity.

Senator Dianne Feinstein said that while she was wearing an American-flag pin on a trip to Europe, the anti-American feeling was so strong, "I was embarrassed to wear it." 

I hope to god she wasn't telling people to put their cigarettes out

Democrats couldn't care less if people in Indiana hate them. 

Yeah, I don't think Evan Bayh worries about that too much.  Idiot.

But if Europeans curl their lips, liberals can't look at themselves in the mirror. 

I'll talk about the Europeans here, because frankly, what Senator Feinstein said was stupid. 

 

I've never, in the 5 months or so that I've spent in Europe throughout my life (I lived in Helsinki for 3 months and have been back several times for trips), met a European who expressed to me a negative view of Americans.  And it's not like I'm someone who adheres to the conventional wisdom in staying in tourist-friendly locales when I travel either.  The bottom line is that a lot of people with a political agenda project what they want to see when they travel overseas.  People who think that the French hate Americans always come back from there with a story about some rude waiter (who was probably just having a bad day) and then rant about how they'll never go back.  I don't have any of those stories.  With that said, I hope it stays that way.

If they were worried about the Europeans, liberals were in a clinical depression over what the terrorists thought of us. 

It's important to understand that when Ann uses the word terrorists, she means everyone in the Middle East.  That will help in understanding the rest of this section.

Liberals instinctively responded to the attack of 9-11 by imputing their own hatred of America to camel-riding nomads. 

If you're wondering where all the rhetoric that Karl Rove recently spewed came from, you've come to the right place.  It gets worse.

The nation had been attacked on its own shores, women widowed, children orphaned, thousands of our fellow countrymen killed.  Liberals saw this as an occasion to ask:  Why do they hate us? 

Of course they did.  Anyone with an IQ over 50 was wondering that.  Even conservatives.  There's no shame in trying to understand why people do bad things.

Only in the case of a terrorist attack on America are liberals consumed with the assailant's motive.* 

What the hell does that even mean?

How about:  Until we understand why rapists would rather violently rape a woman than take her to dinner and a movie, we cannot respond to the crime of rape.

Does Ann really believe that you can't prevent future rapes by trying to figure out what makes them more likely to happen?  I have to ask again, is she really that dumb?

Bill Clinton, the man who deployed the best fighting force on the globe to build urinals in Bosnia, actually said of Muslim terrorists, "They have good reason to hate us...after all, we sent the Crusaders to try and conquer them." 

Not surprisingly, there's no footnote for this one. 

They have long memories, these fascists. 

Well, they have longer memories than you if you think we were only building urinals in Bosnia.

As I recall, the Crusades ended in 1290. 

Around the end of the era where people like Ann Coulter were considered progressive.

We're really sorry that seven hundred years ago a bunch of Europeans responded aggressively to the sack of Jerusalem by a mob of Muslim savages. 

Even back then, the Muslims were savages.

The Muslims weren't exactly shrinking violets. 

Of course not, because in 1290, stereotype-land was real!

They had spent the prior several hundred years grabbing a lot of territory that wasn't theirs. 

What kind of people would do that?

Perhaps the Europeans were still smarting over the Muslim onslaught at Tours four hundred years earlier. 

Those people had some long memories too.  Must have been the lack of cable channels.

But okay, let's stipulate:  "We" were strong and "you" were right.  There is no grudge worth holding for seven hundred years.

Oh, if only I could live that long.

Gore said America will only create more enemies if "what we represent to the world is an empire." 

Man, she is really pimping Al Gore.

We must mollify angry fanatics who seek our destruction because otherwise they might get mad and seek our destruction. 

Actually, it's more because they might get enough recruits and succeed at it.

He also complained that we have "abandoned almost all of Afghanistan" - rather than making it part of our empire, evidently. 

No resources there.  I'd say it's kind of a shitty place to start up your empire as well.

He seemed to think it was our responsibility to "stabilize the nation of Afghanistan," "pacify the countryside," and send them valentines. 

Actually, that was our responsibility.  Although the valentines ended up just being our looking the other way as they once again became the world's largest supplier of heroin again.

Liberals think war is a Miss Congeniality contest.

And apparently Republicans think it's a Disney movie.

One could mine every war-making text throughout history - Sun Tsu, Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan - without finding a single reference to being liked by your enemies as a tactic associated with winning a war. 

You could also read those books and find nothing about fighting terrorism in the Internet age either.

Gore said foreigners are not worried about "what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do." 

This is more of a comment related to the previous line, but unlike previous wars, this war does not deal with the same dynamics.  Although we certainly don't care if we are liked by those who profess to be our enemy, we should sure as hell care when people who are neutral decide to sympathize with that enemy.  And the worst reaction to that is to consider that person the enemy as well.  Any war strategist knows that the worst thing you can do in war is make more enemies than you started with.  It's exactly what we've done in Iraq.  We've given people way too much motivation to sympathize with al-Qaeda and their mission. 

Good.  They should be worried.  They hate us?  We hate them.  

Remember, Ann was not referring to terrorists here.  She was referring simply to foreigners.  Canadians?  We hate them.  Got it?

Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us.  We want to make them die. 

Maybe one day we'll figure out a way to do it that actually works.

There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics.* 

Actually, that only quells weak-willed Americans.  It makes many, many, more fanatics.

So sorry they're angry - wait until they see American anger.

And for the 99.9% of foreigners that weren't angry at us.  They'll be angry soon.

Japanese kamikaze pilots hated us once, too.  A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons got their attention. 

I wonder what it was like to live in a time where the world actually trusted America enough to feel safe with us having nuclear weapons, because America did not let them down.  It must have been great.

Now they are gentle little lambs.

As a thought experiment, let's imagine what would happen if we dropped a nuclear bomb on Ramadi or Mosul right now.  Would the rest of the Arab world be gentle little lambs or would most of the world become terrorists and several large governments declare war on us?  The difference between World War II and the current conflict we're in could not possibly be wider.  And it's bad news when pathetic simpletons like Coulter have so many people nodding their empty heads in agreement.

America is fighting for its survival and the Democrats are obsessing over why barbarians hate us. 

Actually, Democrats are wondering why we thought we were "fighting for our survival" simply because of a single terrorist attack.  

Instead of wondering why foreigners hate Americans, a more fruitful inquiry for the Democrats might be to ask why Americans are beginning to hate Democrats.

As I write this, we're nearing the 2000 casualty mark in Iraq, with tens of thousands of wounded soldiers returning, and an estimated 30% of them developing some sort of mental problems when trying to readjust to their lives.  We've turned the country of Iraq into arguably the most fertile ground for terrorism that the world has ever seen.  We've helped Iran immensely and we've made the job that European countries have in fighting radicalism within their own borders considerably more difficult. 

 

The long-term toll of this disastrous war is barely visible at this point, yet the wheels are in motion for my generation to have to do a lot to ensure that American society can maintain it's economic dominance, it's reputation as a friendly nation, and it's respect as a moral compass for the rest of the world.  Forgive me if this translates into some bitterness towards people like Ann Coulter, who helped drum up support for this war based upon tired old stereotypes and blatant falsehoods.  There's so much from this chapter that makes me want to put my fist through a wall, but nothing more than the fact that she decries the kind of political discussions that allow rational Democrats and Republicans to arrive at ways for America to move forward and prosper.  A lot of Democrats have been wondering why so many Americans have begun to hate them, while spouting nearly identical irrational viewpoints and outright lies.  By convincing the large numbers of Americans who don't follow the Middle East that Democrats are sympathetic to the terrorist cause, Ann Coulter has played a major role in that, even as she pretends just to be an observer.  And soon, I hope to see the day when Ann Coulter wakes up and asks herself why so many Americans are beginning to hate what she and the Republicans have done.  The day is coming.