If any prominent figure on today’s political scene deserves to be labeled a “McCarthyite” (as in Joe, not Gene), it is, of course, Ann Coulter, who has a knack for out-of-bounds rhetoric and context-free quotes. Liberals who denounce her for those sins are right to do so, and conservatives who pretend that she is just a misunderstood young lady are being foolish. Still, I’d be more impressed by the liberal accusatores if they didn’t segue directly from condemning Miss Coulter’s McCarthyism to practicing their own. Witness the frenetic claims that Governor Romney, who immediately preceded the Coultermouth as a speaker at last weekend’s CPAC, offered her praise.
To take a relatively non-culpable example, left-libertarian Ilya Somin writes,
The very fact that she was invited to address the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major movement conservative event, is a sign of her continued good standing for much of the right. The fact that the previous speaker – prominent Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney – praised her, isanother. . . .
Romney, ironically, was the speaker who immediately preceded Coulter. In his speech, he had praised her, saying: “I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing.”
Professor Somin’s links indicate that he picked up this quotation from the leftist site Think Progress. He should have known better.
Let’s look at what the governor actually said. The quoted words came at the beginning of his speech:
It’s good to be with so many conservatives. In fact, I invited all the conservatives in Massachusetts to come hear me today and I’m glad to report that they are both here. I’m happy to learn that after I speak you're going to hear from Ann Coulter. That’s a good thing. I think it’s important to get the views of moderates.
Anyone who can’t figure out that this exordium is in jest and that the joke turns on the fact that Ann Coulter is not a moderate, is in severe need of remedial reading classes. I assume that most of the shriekers are not, in fact, shrieking in good faith – proven in Think Progress’s case by the fact that it truncated the quotation – and that some of the others, such as Professor Somin, have foolishly relied on their distorted accounts. In other words, we have an exemplary instance of McCarthyites gulling the naive, just as the infamous senator from Wisconsin liked to do.
BTW, this is the 1,000th Stromata Blog post. The very first was 984 days ago, on June 23, 2004. I wonder what I would have done with the time spent on those thousand entries if blogging didn’t exist.
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