Mar 05 2007
An Open Letter to the “Conservatives”
Dear sir or madam:
I write this in response to this
Open Letter to Ann Coulter. My response is: nope. Sorry- too late.
Ann Coulter has never been “witty, intelligent, and provactive”. She has always been a shrill purveyor of rank hatred. At the CPAC conference she did not “cross the line”, or at least ways anymore than she has done pretty much every time she has opened her mouth. This is the lady who opinioned “”my only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” Who regularly “jokes” about killing liberal members of the supreme court. Another quote- from long before the other night- is the “we need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too.”
This is not provocative. This is psycopathic.
Nor is Ann Coulter at all unqiue. She is an ideological and political soul-mate to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michele Malkin, and many others. And it’s not just limited to the paid media personalities. One does not have to read very much of right wing blogs like RedState.org or Little Green Footballs, or listen long to right wing radio, to discover sentiments even more extreme and violent than those espoused by Coulter.
“Ya gotta dance with them what brung ya” works both ways- ya gotta dance with them ya brung. It is far too late to distance yourself from the views of Ann Coulter, now that they’re being recognized (and rejected) for what they are. You can no more reject here than I, as a liberal, can reject Howard Dean or Al Gore. You can not lionize them one day and denounce them the next. The fact that blind, bigoted hatred is not the image you wish to project (the lie you wish to sell), never the less it is the truth.
And while you’re at it, the same applies to George W. Bush. You have spent six years building him up- the war president, the compassionate conservative, Mr. Mission Accomplished, our commander in chief. Bush’s budget shortfalls are not signifigantly different from the massive deficits of Bush I and Reagan. W’s contempt for the Constitution is only somewhat worse than the contempt shown by Reagan and Bush in the Iran Contra scandal. Iraq was not the first country we attacked without provocation- as Panama and Grenada will attest to. You are several decades too late in denouncing these policies, simply because now they have become unpopular.
This also applies to the Iraq war, and the lies given for going. It’s become popular, now that both have lost their allure, to start denouncing them. Too late. They’re yours.
There are some people who still consider themselves Republicans and Conservatives who did not support Bush, the Iraq War, Coulter, etc., even when it wasn’t popular to do so (Chia- I’m talking about you here). To these people, I say that this is the Republican party as it exists today. Take a good, long, hard look. If the party of Lincoln, of Teddy Rosevelt, of Eisenhower, exists today, it exists as a wing of the Democratic party. If you support the Republican party, you are supporting the Ann Coulters of this world.
Signed,
Brian Hurt
P.S.: It seems that she’s done this before. From this FOX News article, we find out that:
Last July, Coulter received some criticism for similar remarks, first saying that Bill Clinton shows “some level of latent homosexuality,” then answering questions about her comment by telling MSNBC “I don’t know if he’s gay. But Al Gore — total fag.”
Which simply goes to show how unexceptional (for her) her remarks really were. Hat tip to the Daily Howler for the lead.
Popularity: 2% [?]
There are some people who still consider themselves Republicans and Conservatives who did not support Bush, the Iraq War, Coulter, etc., even when it wasn’t popular to do so (Chia- I’m talking about you here). To these people, I say that this is the Republican party as it exists today.
I certainly support conservatism, although I’ve never been particularly fond of the Repulican party: keep in mind that the first election I paid any attention to was the lead-up to Clinton’s first term, and then, it was already obvious (even to a punk kid) that whatever the Republicans were, they weren’t conservative.
Conservativism — at least, that thing I identify as conservativism, for lack of a better word — is based on a deep-seated hesitancy to blow money or clout on unproven tasks. It believes that people will figure out how to manage things given time and opportunity, and that the government should set the rules and boundaries of the game, not play it.
And, of course, there’s my deep-seated animosity towards our federal government. It’s not that I dislike having a federal government, or that I hate America: I most certainly don’t. But I do dislike any organization which has no real accountability for what it does or does not accomplish, sets its own goals, does its own performance reviews, gives itself raises, and generally spends most of its time talking to itself about things it has no experience with. The state governments are at least reigned in by the federal government, and by smaller budgets and scope. The federal government has no limitations whatsoever, and no accountability for its inevitable and continual abuse of that power.
In any case, when it comes to political parties, I’m neutral. I look at the candidates, and I’ll vote for the one that has ticked me off the least. That usually means voting anti-incumbant, since it’s the minority party that is always the one talking about civil rights and cleaning house.
Note that the Democrats, now they’re in power, have suddenly gotten really quiet about civil rights issues like reassessing the PATRIOT ACT or shedding light on Gitmo. You want to investigate something? Investigate those abuses. Yet, for some reason, they strangely don’t really feel like it anymore. Libby and Iraq — things that it can pin purely on the opposing party with only a slight revisionist history — now THOSE are things they’re really going to go to town on.
At the end of the day, both parties spend a lot of time and effort putting party before country, and that really frustrates me.