The Coulter Conservative Kool-Aid Stun Gun Test

Ann Coulter isn't impressed with Fred Thompson. When Sean Hannity asked about Thompson as a conservative, Coulter sneered that Hannity would make the better candidate. More generally, she went on to express a preference for Blue State candidates like Rudy Giuliani over Red State Republicans in general. Coulter worries that Republicans from conservative states like Thompson's state of Tennessee know they have to show a minimum conservatism to be elected but don't have to be authentically conservative. I guess conservatism is easy to fake.

But how can you tell who's an authentic conservative or not?

Coulter implies that Rudy Giuliani has been a conservative all along but was forced (poor baby!) to pretend to hold liberal positions in order to get elected in New York City. But what's to say that Giuliani isn't faking conservatism now in order to win the Republican nomination and that he won't revert back to he liberal ways once he faces the general electorate?

If being a Republican, saying you're a conservative, and taking conservative positions is not a sufficient guarantee for being a "real" conservative, then there has to be some other kind of way to establish conservative authenticity. No more of this George Bush "compassionate conservatism" and we value our Mexican neighbors stuff. Real conservatives want to know that they're getting a real right-winger when they vote for someone in a Republican primary.

Let me suggest the "Coulter Conservative Kool-Aid Stun Gun Test" (with apologies to Thomas Wolfe's classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). It would be easy to test whether a candidate has swallowed the right-wing kool-aid or not. Bring an Arab-looking person out onto the stage of a Republican debate, tell the candidates that the person is an recalcitrant terrorist, and ask them to interrogate the "suspect" and shoot him if necessary with a gun rigged Russian roulette style with five stunners and one live bullet.

The real Coulter conservative would shoot and would have a smile on his face when he pulled the trigger.

Why?

Of course, Coulter conservatives aren't concerned with the rights of accused criminals and are even less worried about whether accused Arabs are really terrorists or not. Ann herself wrote about the travesty of the Warren Court's expansion of rights for accused criminals in Godless. Moreover, a real conservative wouldn't care whether the "accused terrorist" was actually a terrorist or not. Eighty to ninety percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib have no connection to terrorism. However, that has not deterred conservatives from the large-scale incarceration of Iraqis or collective punishment of the Iraqi Sunni population. So what if a few innocent civilians are captured in the broad sweep of populations that support terrorism.

Moreover, real conservatives support, and in Limbaugh's case, revel in torture techniques like "water-boarding," sleep deprivation, religious humiliation, and the like. What harm would a little public display of "aggressive interrogation" do to a recalcitrant terrorist? None if you're a real conservative! In fact, a conservative might argue that the possibility of dying before an enemy audience might just be the thing that would finally break down a terrorist.

What if the candidate fires the bullet that kills the "terrorist?" A conservative would go "so what." Conservatives support the death penalty, are all for the rigorous treatment of accused terrorists, and have made noises about bringing back public executions. No real conservative would mind seeing a terrorist die if it advanced the American cause in the war on terror.

An added bonus of the Coulter Conservative Kool-Aid Stun Gun Test is that it would put Republicans on the front-line. Liberals are always ridiculing conservatives all the time as chicken-hawks and weenie boys and the Bush administration is getting tired of it. The Coulter Conservative Test would make every real conservative among the Republican candidates an active participant in the fight against terror. Also, once elected, a real conservative could participate in more interrogations as an on-going testimony to conservative authenticity. It would be the political version of continuing to take communion in church after a conversion experience.

The Coulter Conservative Kool-Aid Stun Gun Test--the only way to know who's a real conservative.