So in the last post I talked about how 2004’s anti-gay crusade was run in large part by a gay man. This bears some relation to another story that was floating around at the time.
Almost a month ago, the Daily Beast ran a short article by Matt Latimer with the tag line: “The flap over Coulter’s speech to a gay Republican group shows that the right’s provocateur is a heck of a lot of more complicated than she’s made out to be.” In it he says: “When informed she could not participate in a political conference if she kept a commitment to speak to a group of gay Republicans, Ms. Coulter told organizers just what they could do with their conference. Noting that she speaks to all kinds of groups whose views she does not necessarily agree with—“the main thing I do is speak on college campuses, which is about the equivalent of speaking at an al Qaeda conference”—Coulter, in her own style, stood for something that conservatives are supposed to believe in: the free exchange of ideas.”
The Daily Beast is one of those centrist papers that tries to draw a false equivalency between the far left and far right to prove that they are in the middle. One of their latest books, Wingnuts, by John Avlon, for example, tries to compare Keith Olberman to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. As Bill Maher says, it’s “fake fairness.” Avlon tries to pretend that he’s independent even though he was the Chief Speechwriter and Deputy Policy Director for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 Presidential Campaign. Avlon has made similar false equivalencies like comparing Code Pink interrupting a Karl Rove speech with the Hutaree militia trying to murder police officers.
So I guess Coulter is really reasonable for talking to gay Republicans because she’s talked to even more hostile groups, like college campuses where the crowd is “like al-Qaida.” And when the Republican Party punishes Coulter for not backing down from talking to a group of gay Republicans, it shows how brave and tolerant Coulter is, not how crazy and backwards the Republicans are.
The poster for the event reads, “GOPride Presents: Homocon 2010: Our gays are more macho than their straights!” Considering who ran the 2004 election, it should probably say, “Our gays are better gay-baiters than their straights!” I mean, I realize that sexual orientation does not change your economic beliefs, but how can anyone be “proud” of being part of a group that utterly loathes them? I don’t even like being thought of as a Democrat because of little things like the “professional Left” comment.
Avlon praises Coulter for standing up to Bill Kristol after Kristol said Steele should resign for his comment about Afghanistan being “Obama’s war” in her article “Bill Kristol Must Resign”:
Having some vague concept of America’s national interest — unlike liberals — the Bush administration could see that a country of illiterate peasants living in caves ruled by “warlords” was not a primo target for “nation-building.”
By contrast, Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.
If Saddam Hussein had been a peach, it would still be a major victory in the war on terrorism to have a Muslim Israel in that part of the globe, and it sure wasn’t going to be Afghanistan (literacy rate, 19 percent; life expectancy, 44 years; working toilets, 7).
You see, Bush was really smart that he wanted to create a “Muslim Israel” in the Middle East despite the fact that it didn’t happen and is never going to happen. Liberals were actually lying when they said they wanted to win Afghanistan first. Bush obviously knew Afghanistan wasn’t worth winning and so went on to Iraq because that was the more important war that we could have won, but didn’t. It’s just that both Bush and Coulter both forgot to mention that the Afghanistan war they were also cheerleading was pointless and a waste of lives and money.
She then says, “endless bipartisan investigations” proved Saddam “was attempting to build nuclear weapons (according to endless bipartisan investigations in this country and in Britain — thanks, liberals!)”
Really? After all this time she still believes that?? What happened to them then?
The Niger uranium forgeries was proven false by Wilson and Plame before the war started.
As for the aluminum tubes, FactCheck says:
The document also said “most” US intelligence agencies believed that some high-strength aluminum tubes that Iraq had purchased were intended for use in centrifuge rotors used to enrich uranium, and were “compelling evidence” that Saddam had put his nuclear weapons program back together.
On the matter of the tubes, however, the report noted that there was some dissent within the intelligence community. Members of Congress could have read on page 6 of the report that the Department of Energy “assesses that the tubes are probably not” part of a nuclear program.
The article continues by saying that despite the evidence, it was still generally believed that Saddam was making a nuclear weapon, but does not give any reason to support those beliefs.
In another article, called “MSNBC Swears to Allah that Obama is Not a Muslim,” Coulter writes:
Evidence for the Proposition That Obama’s a Muslim: His father was a Muslim; his mother, an atheist, married two Muslims; he attended a Muslim school in Indonesia from age 6 to 10; and, during the campaign, he proudly posted on his webpage his statement that America is “no longer” a Christian nation, a statement he has repeated as president, while announcing on French TV that America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”
Evidence for the Proposition That Republicans Are Racist: (Nothing so far.)
So Obama being a Muslim is perfectly reasonable? Why? Because the father he never met was a Muslim (not true — he was Agnostic/Atheist), and his mother was… an Atheist? Since when is Atheism equivalent to Islam? I guess that’s just the Right’s typical categorization process of putting everything bad on the Left. Also, the school he attended was secular, not Islamic, but even if it was, who would otherwise believe that Obama decided to covert to Islam at 10 years old based on that?
Factcheck shows Obama’s site said America was no longer just a Christian nation: “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation – at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”
Actually, despite the defense, Coulter believes Obama is an atheist because “It is a fact that any non-retarded person (thank you, Rahm Emanuel!) sitting in the Rev. Wright’s church for 20 minutes, much less 20 years, does not believe in God” and “All liberals are atheists. Only the ones who have to stand for election even bother pretending to believe in God. ”
Politifact also pointed out a shrewd mode of comparison in saying “There have been more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by … Muslims in Obama’s first 18 months in office than in the six years under Bush after he invaded Iraq.” As always, 9/11 doesn’t count.
Another statement is that while Coulter can’t make a direct link from Liberal’s “high” tax policy to the desire for murder, she can make a direct link between their environmentalism to “trying to kill humans.” Well, I guess not connecting taxes to a hatred of mankind shows some amount of reasonableness, but do we have to applaud the Right every time they add a short “the sky is blue” comment at the end of their “green is red” diatribe?
The only reason anyone cares about what Ann Coulter thinks is because she made a name for herself on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. The same is true for Laura Ingraham and Christine O’Donnell. Of course Bill Maher can never become as popular as the conservative chicks he gives microphones to because his ideas are too “extreme” for the “Liberal Media.” Yes, it’s amazing that someone known for extreme right-wing views amazingly acknowledged that Obama’s birth certificate actually does exist, but she never used that known fact to write against her own party’s tactics and has otherwise endorsed every other right-wing lie (“Environmentalists hate mankind”), will smear Democrats with lies she doesn’t really believe (“Obama is a Muslim” in one article; “Obama is an Atheist” in another), will stretch the facts to make her case (“Terrorism increased with Obama”), and parrots every other crazy, redundant idea floating around in the tea parties.