What's-her-face, againIn the latest edition of the "last" post about a certain female conservative nutjob writer ... Many conservatives have criticized her both for her columns and her recent book. But apparently, this somehow means that conservatives are bad people, according to Sam Tanenhaus, writing in Slate. Eugene Volokh put it this way: Slate has a quite remarkable column about Ann Coulter's Treason. Conservatives have been lambasting Coulter -- and, while I haven't read her book, people (including conservatives) whom I trust on this have said the lambasting is well-earned. But, according to the Slate piece (whose subtitle, remarkably, is "In her new book, Ann Coulter tells the unvarnished truth -- and makes the conservatives mad"), all this just shows how scummy conservatives are! The logic is perplexing, and I doubt that I can do it justice through the excerpts.The gist of the Slate piece is that while she wanted to forcibly convert Muslims to Christianity, evangelicals wanted them to voluntarily convert; she defended McCarthy, while someone ran an attack ad against a Democrat; she called liberals "traitors", while William Safire wrote that criticisms on the administration may aide the Baathists as a side effect; in all three cases, the author argues that they're equally bad. What differentiates her from other conservatives is not their views but how they make their arguments. I agree with all of Volokh's criticisms of this article, including his conclusion: To me and my friends on "the 'responsible' right," distinctions between voluntary and forcible conversion, and between accusations of inadvertent and unintended harm and intentional betrayal, are not just matters of "tact," "tactics," or "good taste." And when a writer implicitly admits that to him such distinctions are just ultimately "semantic," then it's hard to give much credit to the rest of his moral -- or logical -- judgment. |
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