LIBERAL INFALLIBILITY: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO COULTER

“Liberals Use Victims as Human Shields”

“The truth cannot be delivered with novocaine. Now Americans recognize this and won’t fall for this practice of liberals foisting their unsalable political opinions on us by using a victim we’re not allowed to respond to. They immunize the message by choosing a messenger with a tragedy. I’ve had it with that.

I feel sorry for all the widows of 9/11. I do not believe that sanctifies their political message or deserves special sanction.” — Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter is stirring up controversy with her new book, ‘GODLESS; the Church of Liberalism’. In particular, she has a chapter called ‘Liberals’ Doctrine of Infallibility: Sobbing Hysterical Women’ in which she describes the self-proclaimed "Jersey Girls", who lost their husband in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and who were front and center in the 9/11 Commission hearings. They have relentlessly accused the Bush administration of various conspiracy theories revolving around 9/11 and WHY? it happened, attacking the Administration with Sheehan-like bravado.

The problem, as Ann Coulter points out, is that any rebuttal to their accusations is met with a harsh rebuke. Despite the issue being discussed, no one can refute their accusations without being condemned for "questioning the authenticity of their suffering." When Jersey Girl Kristin Breitweiser says, "Three thousand people were murdered on George Bush’s watch," any dialogue about who really caused 9/11 or even Bill Clinton’s culpability is met with dismissal and a chastising sigh, "Leave her alone! She lost her husband in 9/11!" The same is true of Cindy Sheehan: "She lost her son in Iraq for God’s sake!" Or John Murtha and John Kerry: "They served proudly in the US military!" Therefore the message is safe because the messenger either is a victim and deserves sympathy.

A paragraph in question in Ann Coulter’s chapter addressing the Jersey Girls is this:

“These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires lionized on TV and in articles about them reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.”

Ouch! Harsh no doubt, but untrue? To the contrary. Coulter hits the nail squarely on the head. (by "enjoying their husband’s death" Coulter is referring to the tangible benefit their situations find them in, from writing books, appearing on TV and in magazines to recklessly promote their accusations). Good proof that criticizing the Jersey Girls as they criticize the Administration is met with disdain because they are widows can be seen in Matt Lauer’s reaction to Ann Coulter in this NBC morning video interview.

Coulter suggests liberals use victims as "human shields" to promote their propaganda. They attribute "absolute authority" to these victims, whether Cindy Sheehan, the Jersey Girls or poor John Murtha, inoculating their commentary from scrutiny. This is absolutely true. How many times on this blog have I been accused of insensitivity for criticizing the sentiments of Cindy Sheehan because, after all, her son died? (oh and by the way, her son Casey Sheehan of 1st Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery Regiment, re-enlisted with the Army in 2004 knowing he would be going to Iraq). True, my husband did not DIE in Iraq, but is my support of Operation Iraqi Freedom then less valid, particularly taking into account that he relays to me 1st hand experience that helps form my understanding of this situation, because he returned? Yet my knowledge by association doesn’t make my position superior; the truth does.

"Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as ‘religion.’" –Ann Coulter

You go, girl.

Watch the Video of Ann Coulter on Hannity and Colmes

ILARIO PANTANO'S MISSION

By Michelle Malkin

***update: Ilario on the Today Show***

I couldn't put down retired 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano's new book, Warlord. Put it at the top of your summer reading list. Send a copy to your local troops-bashing columnist or cartoonist. The writing is riveting. The timing fortuitous. The message timeless. Pantano has give us more than just a war story. This is an American story.

Blog readers will be familiar with the basic true-life military and courtroom drama that Pantano endured last year. Last spring, Pantano was fighting for his life—charged by the U.S. military with premeditated murder in the deaths of two Iraqi insurgents. The Marine sniper who enlisted at 17, served in Desert Storm, and rejoined the military after 9/11 at 31 faced the death penalty for defending himself and his men in the heat of battle. He was accused then, as Marines are being accused now, of wantonly executing Iraqis to send a message.

Lt. Pantano and his family fought back. He was exonerated. But not, however, without deep personal costs. After going through hell, he resigned from the Marines. He and his family faced jihadi death threats—including some posted on a website traced to Pakistan showing Lt. Pantano beheaded. Retired Marines set up a security watch to stand guard around his home.

In a passage that reminds me of the Times of London/Chicago Sun-Times Haditha photo debacle, Pantano recounted how Al-Jazeera ran his story "with a bogus picture of two blindfolded detainees and a caption suggesting that I had shot two bound and blindfolded men."

Because the press and propagandists spread his photos and smeared his name far and wide, he is forced to this day to take extraordinary precautions to protect his lovely wife and two children.

Milbloggers countered the rush to judgment about Pantano. Euphoric Reality helped expose Pantano's chief accuser--an unhinged, disgruntled sergeant who trolled on milblogs badmouthing Pantano and posting information that conflicted with his acccounts to naval investigators. The revelations helped sink the prosecution's case. Euphoric Reality has an audio interview with Pantano up today here.

I was honored to meet Pantano (and his wife, Jill) last week. Our segment with him is now available for viewing at Hot Air.

In a striking twist of fate, Pantano's book comes at a time when his experience, his perspective, and his abiding faith in the Marines and our country are all needed now more than ever.

His mission: Defend the Defenders who volunteer to put themselves in harm's way for their countrymen.

Your mission: Make this book a best-seller.

Spread the word.

HARMON DOES HER MURTHA IMPRESSION. NEWT NAILS HER ON IT

That’s the impression I got after watching Jane Harman, Dan Senor and Newt Gingrich debate what the American plan should be in a post-Zarqawi Iraq on Fox News Sunday. Here’s what was said that gave me that impression:

REP. JANE HARMAN (D), CALIFORNIA: Well, first of all, I doubt any Democrats will be included, so I appreciate the fact that Fox News included me to your war council.

But what would help with doubters, and there are doubters in both parties all over the country, number one, if the president decided that Rumsfeld should go, and, number two, if he announced that he is going to start now asking the generals to redeploy our troops because going forward the U.S. objectives, and we have at least three of them, can best be achieved politically, not militarily.

Here’s Mr. Newt’s response:

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, let me establish a couple of simple principles that will probably be politically uncomfortable. First, we ought to rely on General Abizaid and General Casey, because they get up every day.
They work this problem every day. Abizaid is fluent in Arabic. Casey is now clearly the field commander working for Abizaid. And if the two of them come in and say you know, we need fewer troops, I’m for fewer troops. If the two of them come in and say you know, we need more troops, I’m for more troops.
You have a brand new Iraqi government that’s finally coming together, and they ought to be part of sitting at that table. But here’s the key psychological point. Iraqis are looking to decide which side is going to win. They look at the Vietnam experience. They look at American politics. And they say OK, are we three months from the Americans cutting and running, are we a year from the Americans cutting and running, are we going to have a helicopter leaving the American embassy in Baghdad the way we did Saigon.
And any gesture by the president that suggests he’s going to move one minute faster than the new Iraqi government and his own field commanders is a signal that says don’t bet on the Americans and don’t bet on freedom, the bad guys are going to win. I think you’ve got, that’s very important psychologically.

When Harman said “we have at least three of them, can best be achieved politically, not militarily”, I heard something from her that I didn’t think I’d ever hear from her: a repitition of Murtha’s ‘policies’. Frankly, I’d thought of Ms. Harman as a serious, thoughtful person on national security issues. I still think that of her for the most part, though her saying that we need to follow the ‘Murtha Doctrine’ is more than a bit troubling.

Mr. Newt nailed it by saying that “any gesture by the president that suggests he’s going to move one minute faster than the new Iraqi government and his own field commanders is a signal that says don’t bet on the Americans and don’t bet on freedom, the bad guys are going to win.” We simply can’t afford to redeploy outside Iraq and still be taken seriously.

Historically speaking, what emboldened bin Laden was seeing us leave Somalia because Bill Clinton took John Murtha’s advice that “we can’t win this militarily.” Bin Laden knew that we’d left Vietnam without achieving victory and he’s playing on that now with Arabs all across the Middle East. Staying the course isn’t a flashy line; it’s just what we have to do to have the requisite credibility in the region. And it’s imperative that we have credibility in the region if we’re going to win the GWOT.

Dan Senor emphasized that with this observation:

DAN SENOR: Yes, and actually, I would say over the last few months, particularly in the Sunni towns, the Iraqis have not been betting on us. They viewed the American military as impotent. They viewed the Iraqi government as in this constant state of formation and not terribly serious.
The last few months since the last election, you talk to the local sheiks there, you talk to a lot of the imams and the tribal leaders. They’re betting on the insurgency. They say that we come into towns and then we leave. We don’t hold them. And the insurgency returns. They insurgency they can bet on.
So I think the significance of the Zarqawi kill is that we sent a message to them that we actually are committed to winning and that they can bet on us. And there are a lot of fence-sitters right now, as the speaker said, who are deciding who to bet on. And I think in that regard, this is a big moment.

Harman’s response was as disappointing as Mr. Newt’s response was encouraging:

REP. JANE HARMAN: I just see this differently. I’m not talking about cutting and running. That’s not at all what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how do we win. We win politically. We don’t win militarily. Playing whack-’em-all in the Anbar province is not working. We kill one person, 10 arise. That’s just not the strategy that can work.
And while I agree that Abizaid and Casey are admirable, I think the commander in chief, our president, and his top-level folks who are going to be in that room the next two days ought to focus on a political strategy. That’s much more likely to achieve victory.
NEWT GINGRICH: But this is a core difference. If you read John Nagl’s brilliant book, “Eating Soup with a Knife”, which is probably the best book on counterinsurgency written by an American in modern times, the truth is in the end, two things have to happen simultaneously. You have to have a political-economic solution where people come together and say I’m on your team and it makes sense, and you’ve got to be able to kill the bad guys. I mean, really bad people have to be killed.

You can’t just declare victory without killing off the bad guys. A political-process only approach tells peace-loving Iraqis and the insurgents the same thing: We’re here until we don’t have the persistence to see a fight through to the end. Mr. Newt’s approach of having a dual track approach of killing evil people while helping build a vibrant, prosperous Iraqi society is the only serious option.

Then there’s this last Newt-Senor observation and Harman’s Murtha-esque claim:

NEWT GINGRICH: I don’t see, though, how pulling American troops out before Abizaid and Casey say they’re ready or pulling them out before the Iraqis feel secure is going to do anything except make the war worse and ultimately lead to an American defeat.
SENOR: I think if you look at two of the most successful U.S.-led operations in 2005, putting down an uprising in Sadr City and the operation in Talafar, that western Sunni town on the western side of Iraq, those involved the U.S. forces handling military roles and military, political and economics.
So we went in there. We conducted operations alongside Iraqi military units. And then we handled infrastructure reconstruction. We had close relations with the Iraqi civilians on the ground. If we start withdrawing our troops, it not only undermines our military capacity, even in small numbers, but our capacity to handle some of these civilian and reconstruction…
REP. JANE HARMAN: Well, I don’t think we’re succeeding militarily. I think it is a huge achievement that there now is a unity government in Iraq, a democratically elected unity government, and all the cabinet positions are filled out.

It’s understandable as to why Ms. Harman isn’t happy with some of the decisions made on the war. Those are legitimate complaints. What isn’t legitimate or wise is essentially saying “We’ve made mistakes militarily. Therefore we need to abandon the military track.” It’s wise, though, to say “We’ve made mistakes militarily. Therefore we need to make better military decisions going forward.” That’s the only viable option at this point.

THE DEMONIZATION OF ANN COULTER

I was reading Ann Coulter's "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," when all the hell broke loose last week. At that point I had not reached the chapter which contained her comments on the 9/11 widows ... so I didn't see the firestorm coming. Now we have Coulter being portrayed as an alien monster and elected officials demanding that her book be banned.

Did Ann Coulter go over the edge a bit with her comments about The Jersey Girls? Possibly. Rather than write that they were enjoying their husband's deaths in the Twin Towers, perhaps Coulter could have said that they were enjoying the attention they've been getting since the terrorist attacks. That comment would have been certainly correct, and far less inflammatory.

The fact is that in her general comments about these 9/11 widows, Coulter got it essentially right. The left most definitely has refined the technique of taking someone deserving of a great deal of public sympathy, and then turning that person into a propaganda machine for the left. The obvious goal here is to create a spokesman that cannot be attacked ... one who's essentially bulletproof. Cindy Sheehan certainly fits that bill. The left would have us believe that to attack anything said by these people is off limits due to the suffering they have experienced. We saw this very concept at work in the defense of Sheehan.

When you think about it, Hillary Clinton has even approached this bulletproof status in some ways. She's a woman, and she's a woman who has endured public humiliation at the hands of her philandering husband. As such, some would say that she is beyond criticism. We've seen examples-a-plenty where Hillary's critics have been criticized for saying such things about a woman, and a long-suffering loyal wife at that!

Back to Coulter's book. I think it is brilliant. Sure, I might not agree with her characterizations of the 9/11 widows, but the larger point she was making there was wholly valid. Throughout the entire book Coulter does an excellent job of showing liberals for what they are. It is one of the most effective and hard-hitting writings of the absurdities, inconsistencies, and outright lies of today's dominant liberal elite in this country.

That is why Ann Coulter must be destroyed!

What you saw last week .. and will see continue into this week ... is a driven attempt by the left in this country, and especially the leftist media, to so completely demonize Ann Coulter as to destroy here effectiveness as a writer and conservative pundit. The focus will continue to be on this one portion of the book relating to the professional widows, without any commentary on the thousands of other very valid points she brought up. Ann Coulter sells a hell of a lot of books. There is no liberal writer out there who comes close, a point not lost on the left.

So, how far is the left willing to go in their efforts to destroy one of our best conservative writers? Well, we now have two New Jersey Democrats (state legislators) who have announced that they want Coulter's books banned in New Jersey. That's right. Banned. They weren't happy just to urge people not to buy the book, they actually want to use the police power of the New Jersey State Government to prevent the books from being sold in the first place! This is America? They're names, by the way, are Joan Quigley and Linda Stender. We'll note that unless we have some rather odd family names at work here, they're both women. These two ladies issued a press release last Friday that was carefully crafted to contain two dominant leftist trigger words. In that release they said;

"Ann Coulter's criticism of 9-11 widows, whose only desire since the attacks have been to repair their shattered lives and protect other families from the horrors they have experienced, is motivated purely by petty greed and hate. .... Coulter's vicious characterizations and remarks are motivated by greed and her desire to sell books . . . She is a leech trying to turn a profit off perverting the suffering of others."

You got the two trigger words, didn't you? "Greed" and "hate." Remember, to a liberal, anyone who makes money in an endeavor frowned upon by liberals is "greedy" and any person who expresses an idea contrary to basic liberal dogma is preaching "hate." How shallow these people are.

At any rate ... please don't let the left scare you off. They've taken one paragraph from an excellent book and are using that section in an attempt to have Ann Coulter banished to some writer's leper colony on the dark side of the Moon. Hopefully they're boosting sales, rather than hurting them.