Ann Coulter is fortunate that she is thin, blonde, pretty, professional, and glib. Those qualities make her immune to attacks that Liberals sometimes foist on inconvenient women. Despite the fact that Liberals claim to be thoughtful and compassionate feminists concerned that women be treated seriously, their attacks on troublesome women would make Archie Bunker blush. Paula Jones, President Clinton’s accuser, was portrayed as a “sleazy” woman from the “trailer parks.” [1] While Left-wing columnist Julianne Malveaux speculated that, Linda Tripp, the woman who taped incriminating conversations with Clinton’s girl friend Monica Lewinsky, had been beaten with an “ugly stick.” Coulter is too attractive, too academically pedigreed, and too smart for charges of being low class or ugly to be plausible. No, she gets to be labeled a “shrew.” [2]
Ann Coulter is a skilled polemicist of the first rank. In her recent book, Slander, she documents Liberal “slander” against Conservatives. She is certainly not above calling names being herself adept at creative descriptions. Her primary problem is not with invective, but slander, the deliberate use of false characterizations. This is especially disconcerting when the slander comes not from Left-wing polemicist but from purportedly objective news sources.
Coulter’s style is brash and over-the-top. Although Slander provides plenty of red meat for true believers, her shrillness will turnoff the neutral, and inflame her enemies. Nonetheless, the book is an almost infinite source of delicious nuggets of information for Conservatives. If she had been more academic in her prose she would have been even more persuasive, but she certainly would not have garnered as much attention. Some of her themes deserve special attention.
There are Conservatives on the radio waves and conspicuous commentators, but, as Coulter explains, the news divisions of the major networks are dominated by former Liberal politicos. Tim Russert, of Meet the Press, worked for Governor Mario Cuomo and Senator Patrick Moyihan. Jeff Greenfield wrote speeches for Robert Kennedy, the same role Chris Matthews filled for President Jimmy Carter and former Speaker of the House Tip 0’Neill. Brian Williams worked in the Carter Administration. Rick Inderfurth went from the Carter Administration to ABC News and back through the revolving door to the Clinton Administration without skipping a beat. A senior vice president of NBC News was a Clinton special assistant. And, of course, Clinton’s famous advisor, George Stephanopoulos, now helps to host ABC’s This Week. Other members of the Clinton Administration have found their way to US News and World Report, Nightline, and Time magazine. However, when Susan Molinari, the attractive Republican Congresswoman from New York, became a Saturday morning news anchor for CBS (a job that lasted about a year), the New York Times gravely intoned about the “potentially awkward transition from being one the nation’s best known advocates of Republican ideology to being a CBS News anchor.”
It is not so much that these people necessarily do incompetent or overtly biased jobs. Tim Russert asks notoriously difficult questions of both sides. However, when a certain unquestioned perspective permeates the newsroom, it governs the unspoken assumptions about which stories to cover and how to cover them. Is it any wonder that, when a gun was used to stop a shooting spree, this fact was ignored in the press because of its inconsistency with calls for gun control? Is it any wonder, that the press protected Clinton’s goof on not understanding the function of a Patriot missile? Is it any wonder, that while the press was making snide comments on what they considered Reagan’s lack of mental acuity during the 1984 election, that year magazines published more general articles on senility than in all the other election years in the last quarter-of-a-century combined? Is it any wonder that the press treated Gore as the “smartest kid in the class,” despite the fact that Bush got higher grades than Gore in college? Though neither Gore or Bush could lay claim to being the smartest in their class, after college Bush earned a Harvard MBA, while Gore failed out of divinity school and dropped out of law school.
Coulter also documents that in the 2000 elections, individual states were called for Gore faster than comparable states were called for Bush. For example, “Gore won Maine by 5 percentage points and was declared the winner within 10 minutes of the polls closing.” By contrast, when “Bush won Colorado by 9 points, it took CNN 2 hours and 41 minutes to make the call.” Throughout election night, Gore’s states were called earlier, despite the fact that, on average, Bush won his states by larger percentage margins.
Fortunately, in the freer market of the Internet, Conservative political web sites do considerably better than Liberal ones. Moreover, ever since books have been sold over the Internet and not through stores where books can be prominently displayed or hidden based on the outlook of booksellers, Conservatives having been winning on the bestsellers lists. Once such books reach there, they are usually deemed “surprise bestsellers.” It is unclear whether this success is because Conservatives write better books or Conservatives just read more.
This success is surprising given the systematic efforts of the major publishing houses to avoid Conservative books and for major newspaper reviewers to ignore them, at least when they are not panning them. In addition, major publishing houses grant generous advances to Liberal authors and not to Conservative ones. For example, Naomi Wolf (the feminist writer who famously lectured Gore on the necessity of becoming the “alpha male”) has had mediocre publishing success, despite rave reviews in the New York Times. By contrast, the critically ignored Illiberal Education, a critique of political correctness on campuses, by Dinesh D’Souza, sold far better than Wolf’s The Beauty Myth and spent five times longer on the bestseller list. On their next books, Wolf received a $600,000 advance, while D’Souza received $160,000.
One wonders why these publishing houses cannot even act in their own economic self-interest. The brilliant editorial minds at Random House have lost $50 million on advances that did not reap adequate sales. As Coulter concludes, “Conservative books may be snubbed in the elite media, hidden by book stores, and regularly spurned by major publishers, but at least we know who the public wants to read.” Coulter’s book has done well is sales. Mainstream reviews of it have been mostly negative. These reviews whine that Coulter complains that Conservatives are being called names, while she does the same thing. She counters that her descriptions are true. A better response would be to attempt to debunk her or find inaccuracies, but that would be hard work and perhaps not yield fruit.
- Evan Thomas, Newsweek.
- Richard Cohen, Washington Post.
The Making of the Modern Middle East
Sunday, August 4th, 2002By the last months of 1966, the Israelis were growing increasingly impatient and frustrated by a series of attacks initiated from the West Bank. Though the area was under the ostensible supervision of Jordan, the attacks were largely instigated and supported by Syria.
On November 10, 1966, three policemen were killed when their vehicle struck a mine. The attack occurred on Israeli land near the West Bank city of Hebron. Michel Oren in Six Days of War describes Jordan’s frantic effort to conciliate and calm the Israelis. “[King ‘Abdalla] Hussein penned a personal condolence letter to [the Israeli Prime Minister Levi] Eskol along with a reaffirmation of his commitment to border security.”
Since there was no direct diplomatic contact with Israel, the King’s letter was rushed off to the US Embassy in Amman, Jordan. From there, the message was cabled to the US Ambassador to Israel in Tel Aviv, Walworth Barbour. The normally efficient and well-respected ambassador tragically decided there was no particular urgency to the cable. He did not convey the letter to Israeli authorities until Monday. Monday was too late. Over the weekend, Israel launched Operation Shredder.
The operation involved 400 soldiers and 10 tanks. Israeli forces plunged into the West Bank town of Rujin al-Mafa’ and destroyed the local police station. In Samu’, the Israeli Defense Forces rounded up the residents and dynamited the homes of those suspected of involvement in attacks.
However, what began as a surgical strike mushroomed out of control. A convoy of 100 Arab Legionnaires stumbled into the area and was decimated by the Israelis. Fifteen Legionnaires died and 54 were wounded. The resulting riots against King Hussein threatened his regime. Rather than punishing the perpetrators of the attacks, the Israelis managed to undermine the most moderate of their Arab adversaries.
With the same insight and illuminating detail and drawing upon recently released archival information, Michael Oren chronicles a detailed and definitive history of the Six Day War. The war is crucial to understanding present day Middle East politics. It is tragic and ironic that the current publicly claimed aspiration of Palestinians (at least for the benefit of the West) is to return to the 1967 borders. If they had been willing to settle for such an arrangement more than thirty years ago, much bloodshed would have been averted and fewer histories written.
Even a third of a century later, Oren’s Six Days of War reminds us of at least three relevant and important lessons now.
Lesson One: It is dangerous to depend on the United Nations (or even friends) for security.
Following Egypt’s defeat in the Suez War of 1956, UN troops occupied the Sinai, separating Israeli from Egyptian troops. Ten years later, both to improve his military position and standing in the Arab world, Nasser demanded that UN peacekeepers vacate the Sinai. U Thant could have postponed and delayed to prevent the UN withdrawal in an effort to stabilize the situation. Instead, U Thant decided that since the Egyptians had invited the United Nations in originally, the UN troops had to leave immediately.
The UN’s precipitous withdrawal from the Sinai helped to set up the chain of events leading to the Six Day War by emboldening Egypt and frightening Israel. Egyptian troops filled the vacuum left by the United Nations, even occupying Sharm Al-Sheikh overlooking the Straits of Tiran. The straits connect the Gulf of Aquaba and the Red Sea. Egyptian control of this strategic point prevented navigation of Israeli shipping. With Egyptian troops on their border, freedom of navigation to the Red Sea threatened, and bellicose statements pouring from Arab capitals, Israelis reasonably feared for their safety and even survival. This fear impelled the Israelis to launch the preemptive attacks that marked the beginning of the Six Day War.
Israel could not even rely on its allies and friends. The US, still trying to be an honest broker, refused to guarantee Israeli security. Tangled in Vietnam and unable to garner support from other western powers, the US would not manage to use its Navy to challenge freedom of navigation in the Straits of Tiran.
Lesson Two: Intra-Arab political bickering manifests itself in anti-Israel actions.
Syria sporadically attacked Northern Israel from the Golan Heights partially as a way to challenge Egypt’s Nasser as the erstwhile leader of the Arab world. Jordan, fearful of its own Palestinian population and a reluctant combatant was pressured to avoid accommodation with Israel. To a large extent, Egyptian truculence and aggressive actions in the Sinai were an effort to recapture Egyptian leadership in the Arab World. Its prestige had been severely tarnished in an ongoing and frustrating war in Yemen. Unfortunately, prestige in the Arab World accrues to those most successfully belligerent to Israel.
Lesson Three: Arab dictators cannot even be relied upon to act in their own or their own country’s self-interest. The allure of self-delusion is often too powerful.
The Israelis were afraid that a modest strike against their adversaries would only embolden them. After the initial attacks, the primary strategic Israeli fear was that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan would petition the United Nations to pressure Israel into a premature armistice. If the war ended too quickly, their adversaries might still be in a position to threaten Israel. Israel could not even depend upon the United States to block any cease-fire resolution in the United Nations Security Council. Fearful of destabilization in the area, the Johnson Administration in the US wanted a cease-fire as soon as possible.
Despite the experience of the Israel War for Independence and the Sinai War of 1956, Nasser was convinced of Egypt’s military superiority. After all, he had recently been able to garner significant military support from the Soviet Union. Syria’s Salah al-Jadid felt safe in Damascus, behind Syria’s fortified perch in the Golan Heights. In the first days of the war, both Syria and Egypt broadcast victorious reports to their people. The reports on Arab radio boasted of troops on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The “Arab Streets” were alive in joyous anticipation of final victory and revenge for the past two wars.
From a military standpoint, the best move for Egypt and Syria would have been to call for an immediate cease-fire. But the self-delusion of their leaders combined with the inflamed public made this move politically difficult. Israel desperately wanted to avoid a cease-fire before their military goals were accomplished, while their adversaries desperately wanted to avoid the ignominy of acknowledging their need for cease-fire. For a few brief days, both the Israelis and Arabs resisted outside pressure for a cease-fire. This strange alliance of purpose between Israel and its neighbors was in the best interest of Israel.
Jordan was the least belligerent of the Arab countries. Ironically, despite the loss of the West Bank, the Jordanian military acquitted itself better than its larger and more aggressive Arab neighbors.
Oren’s chronicle of the period presents a balanced and honest history that puts the period into perspective. It documents much of the predicate of the current situation in the Middle East. Without the conquest of the lands, there would have been no “land for peace” possibility. Immediately after the war, Israel offered such a proposition to each of its neighbors. It would take a decade for Egypt under Anwar Sadat to accept such a proposal. The Palestinians in the West Bank have not yet figured out how to accept a land for peace proposition. Syria still provides support for terrorist attacks. They will not likely soon regain the Golan Heights.
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