Yes, Virginia! The Republicans Have More Than Tax Cuts

I don't know what someone like Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) is talking about when he says the Republicans are just the party of tax cuts:

Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a conservative who keeps a bust of Reagan on his desk, surprised me by declaring that the Reagan era is over. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts," he said. "The people's desires have changed, but we're still stuck in our old issue set."

That's so 1990's.


Now, the Republicans are the party of torture. The Republicans used to talk about taxes, gay sex, and terrorism, but now it's "total torture talk"--"the triple t"-- all the time. Last week, it was Karl Rove explaining that everybody tortured people, but that only "banana republics" prosecuted their torturers. He was joined by Condoleeza Rice who explained to Stanford undergrads that George Bush was right to say that torture was legal because he went to both Yale (undergrad) and Harvard (MBA).


Apparently, Stanford has a big inferiority complex when it comes to Ivy League colleges.


Ok, I exaggerate.


There's also been a steady drip, drip of GOP torture talk this week. Yesterday, it was Ann Coulter and John Bolton. Bolton seemed to be concerned that Spanish judges would be using Inquisition torture techniques on American torturers to gain confessions. Coulter showed a little conservative "manpride" by calling American torturers "wussified" for not coming up to the level of the Japanese torturers we executed after WWII.


And that's not all. Today, Dick Cheney was on North Dakota talk radio saying that American interrogators only torture as a last resort when they got really bored. People say Dick Cheney looks bad with his crooked mouth and Voldemort Avada Kedavra stare, but Cheney looks a lot better than Arlen Specter when he talks about making "Torture today . . . Torture tomorrow . . . Torture forever" the catchy new slogan of the Republican Party.


Ok, I'm still exaggerating.


But these exaggerations come close to capturing how momentously weird and stupid the compulsive GOP defense of torture is beginning to sound.


Identifying yourselves as the "party of torture" is one of the surest ways to lose elections in any kind of democratic country. You can almost feel people start to cover their mouths in fear when Republicans go on and on about waterboarding.


Ultimately, I think Patrick McHenry is wrong. The Republicans should stick to cutting taxes. It's better to sound simple-minded and out of date than to come off as monsters.

Townhall's Darling Ann Coulter

Townhall has a profile of Ann Coulter by the heroine-worshipping Lisa dePasquale. I'm not sure whether dePasquale's essay is "fawning," "gushing," or paid for by Ann Coulter, but only aides to the pope are so blandly worshipful in real life.

Several months ago, Ann and I were in the same city for two weeks and finally connected the day before I left. We spent the evening drinking chardonnay, eating stale potato chips while talking about boys, the election and “CPAC gossip,” as she put it. At one point she said, “What time do you think it is?” I guessed it was probably 2 a.m. I was wrong. We had been blabbering and getting eaten up by mosquitoes until 5 a.m. Like millions of others, I have read Ann Coulter’s books and columns, seen her on TV, heard her on the radio, witnessed raucous speeches on college campuses and enjoyed her numerous appearances at CPAC—yet I’ll still stay up until five in the morning to hear what she’ll say next.

Interesting that they were talking about "boys." Coulter's well into her forties but doesn't have enough attachment to traditional values to have even a bad marriage to her credit. Maybe Bill O'Reilly should check her out for pedophilia.

This is a good place to note that Coulter's actually been off her game and out of the limelight for most of the last year. Guilty may have sold, but it didn't really make the same kind of waves as Coulter's previous books. She still delivers the punch lines, but they just don't have the same zing they used to have.

Who knows why? Maybe Coulter's getting stale. Maybe the audience is jaded. Maybe she's burdened by guilt over dating Penthouse heir Bob Guccione, jr. Maybe she's sad over the deaths of her parents.

But Ann Coulter's not the force she used to be.

Let Coulter Be Coulter

CANCELING COULTER. It's been announced that Ann Coulter's appearance on Tuesday's Today Show to promote her new book was canceled. That's a bad idea. It was also a bad idea for Media Matters to launch a campaign against Coulter's television appearance. Keeping Coulter out of the public eye is bad political morality and bad politics. If anything, sensible people on the left should be trying to make Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh even more prominent than they are now.

Why is an embargo on Ann Coulter bad political morality?

One word: censorship.

Whether we on the left like it or not, Ann Coulter is a major figure in American society. She also makes her living primarily as a writer and promotes her books through media appearances and interviews. Coulter is best known for her television appearances, but she also gives interviews to talk radio and magazines and does speeches at universities and mega-churches. Preventing Coulter from making public appearances in venues that would otherwise welcome her is a form of censorship. As John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, freedom of thought involves promoting ideas as well as publishing them. By seeking to prevent Coulter from appearing on Today, Media Matters was circumscribing her ability to promote her ideas, limiting the discussion of her ideas in the public realm, and thereby censoring her.

Given that censorship is bad political morality in any kind of free society, Media Matters is morally wrong in their effort to get NBC to cancel Coulter's appearance.

WORTH HER WEIGHT IN GOLD. It's also important to emphasize that keeping Coulter off the Today show is bad politics. In many ways, Ann Coulter is the most recognizable face of movement conservatism in the United States. Where conservative celebrities like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly all live in their own version of right-wing caves, Coulter is out in the world mesmerizing audiences with her daring defiance of contemporary political morality, i.e., "political correctness." Where Limbaugh et al., gingerly venture over the line into racism, homophobia, and misogyny, Coulter goes all in by arguing that women shouldn't have the right to vote, calling John Edwards and Al Gore explicatives for being gay, and calling African-Americans everything but the n-word.

This is why the left hardly has a better friend than Ann Coulter. Coulter is the telegenic face of conservative hatred of black people, gays, women, Hispanics, Jews, and women. Not that the non-white, non-male, and non-Christian population hasn't already gotten the message, but Coulter is a constant and especially prominent reminder that the Republican Party is the party of social bigotry in the United States.

In other words, Ann Coulter is worth her weight in gold to the left. If anything, Media Matters and Huffington Post should be booking more shows for Coulter rather than keeping her from appearing on already scheduled programs.

So, let Coulter be Coulter. It's the right thing to do and it's good liberal politics.

Off-Her-Game Ann Coulter Whacks Kwanzaa. In her Christmas column today, Ann Coulter took a few whacks at Kwanzaa--the African-American oriented winter holiday. As a talented political comedian, Coulter gets in her usual insults, demeaning characterizations, and one liners. Here's a couple:

When Karenga (Dr. Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanza) was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from "classical Marxism," he essentially explained that under Kawaida, we also hate whites. While taking the "best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism" -- which one assumes would exclude the forced abortions, imprisonment of homosexuals and forced labor -- Kawaida practitioners believe one's racial identity "determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding." There's an inclusive philosophy for you.

But Coulter is also off her game. Coulter's idea is that she can get in a few shots at white liberals and their African-American political allies by taking a comical blunderbuss to Kwanzaa. But she doesn't get there. In fact, Dr. Maulana Kerenga is not a well known or widely celebrated figure. So, ridiculing him doesn't get Coulter to bigger targets like Nancy Pelosi, Jesse Jackson, or Barack Obama. It's just another conservative rant against black people.

Coulter's sneering put-downs of Kwanzaa don't help either.

Kwanzaa itself is a nutty blend of schmaltzy '60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven "principles" of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life -- economics, work, personality, even litter removal. ("Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.") It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

Like improving the community is a bad thing. Kwanzaa has the same schmaltzy good intentions, niceness, and helpfulness as Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Whacking Kwanzaa as a Marxist aberration is the equivalent of taking a two by four to the Easter Bunny.

It ain't pretty.

But Coulter's been off her game ever since John McCain nailed down the Republican nomination Offended by McCain and wrong-footed by Obama (isn't everybody?), Coulter kept the one-liners flying but hasn't been sure how to attack her targets, what her conservatism has to say about the issues of the day, or how to advance the conservative cause.

Completely irrelevant during the presidential election, Coulter still hasn't found her post-election groove.