I find it hard to argue with most of what she has to say. Highlights below:
George W
Bush's swerve away from his father's preppy patrician style has ended up, as you note, as a hammy caricature of B-movie clichés about the folksy, plain-talking Westerner. His Texas accent has bizarrely gotten more pronounced since he's lived in Washington -- a defense mechanism of reverse snobbery.
I think Bush genuinely wanted to challenge and critique the establishment assumptions of his heritage and Ivy League education, but he lacked the verbal skills to do so. And his problems were compounded by his ineptitude in making top appointments. He got not sound counsel but fantasy and folly from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- whose presence from the start signaled Bush's slack and even masochistic deferral to his father's administration.
Iraq
"Victory"-- a word constantly on President Bush's hopeful lips -- cannot be achieved in an amorphous insurgency or in a vast land with indefensible borders that is splintered among ancient sects and tribes. There is no distinct enemy, only a welter of saboteurs hiding among the population, whose loyalties cannot be assessed by a foreign force embarrassingly lacking elementary knowledge of local culture and languages. Our troops are being asked to convert, pacify and reconstruct even while waging war and hence are constantly being put in exposed positions where they can be killed or maimed with simple roadside devices.
Gun Control
As a Salon columnist (dating back to the founding of Salon in 1995), I have tried to provide a forum for defenders of the Second Amendment to make their case. The Northeastern major media, which remain heavily liberal, rarely permit these voices to be heard.
I do not own guns and have no interest in them. (Swords, those Homeric and chivalric emblems, have always attracted me more.) But as a libertarian, I read the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights as granting to private citizens the right to bear arms against the potential abuses of a government turned tyrannous. Furthermore, should police authority evaporate after a cataclysm of storm, flood, earthquake or terrorism, citizens have a right to defend their families and property against criminals and looters. If food and water are in short supply over a protracted period, expect predators and violence.
The horrendous problem of illegal guns now rampant among the urban underclass cannot be solved by depriving all American citizens of their Second Amendment rights. Major cities must address their internal problems, which include improving public education and vocational training, creating job-rich public works projects, and instituting on-the-street neighborhood policing. The major media, concentrated in their metropolises, should stop extrapolating their local issues to the nation as a whole.
Global Warming
... I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.
Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.
Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault.
Ann Coulter
My problem with Ann Coulter is not the subjects she tackles, which are always substantive, but her carelessness of research and argumentation. She has frankly admitted that she now writes her books as if they were e-mails to her friends. I like her boldness and vigor, but I see no excuse for such indifference to craftsmanship.
Ideas, whether of the right or the left, deserve respect. But Coulter increasingly treats them like throwaway lines. The rapier thrust of true wit is not the bump-de-dump of a bad joke. But evidently Coulter can no longer tell the difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment