Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terroism

By Ann Coulter

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Liberals demand that the nation treat enemies like friends and friends like enemies. We must lift sanctions, cancel embargoes, pull out our troops, reason with our adversaries, and absolutely never wage war – unless the French say it’s okay. 

(Coulter 2003, 2)

In the 1988 presidential campaign, Vice President George Bush pointed out that his opponent Michael Dukakis had vetoed a bill requiring students to begin their day with the Pledge of Allegiance. Liberal heads spun with the dark reminders of the McCarthy era. Dukakis instantly compared Bush’s dastardly trick of citing his record “to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting during the 1950s.”¹ Despite this slur against his patriotism, Dukakis said, “The American people can smell the garbage.” At least sophisticated Americans could smell the garbage. ²As one journalist said of Bush’s unwarranted reference to Dukakis’s record, it was intended to “rile up” ignoramuses in the American populace: the “folks who don’t know any better,” whose inferior “education or experience has not taught them that the right to speak out is the rudder of this great big boat we call America.”³ The only people whose “right to speak out” is not part of this great big boat we call America are Republicans who dare to mention that a Democrat vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance. Free speech is a one-way ratchet for traitors. While journalists assailed Bush for creating an atmosphere of intolerance for those who “object to patriotic oaths,” they didn’t mind creating an atmosphere of intolerance toward those who support patriotic oaths.⁴

Later, while campaigning at a naval base, Bush said of Dukakis, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he thinks a naval exercise is something you find in the Jane Fonda Workout Book.” Again, there were wails of “McCarthyism” all around. Showing the left’s renowned ability to get a joke, one reporter earnestly demanded to know: “Did Bush mean to imply that Dukakis is anti-military?”⁵ Bush responded to the hysteria over his Jane Fonda joke, saying, “Was that funny? Reasonably funny? A naval exercise – I thought that was pretty funny.”⁶

(Coulter 2003, 2-3)

In the early fifties, ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers said, “In this century, within the next decades, [it] will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become fee, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed.” It had been his fate, he said, to have been “in turn a witness to each of the two great faiths of our time” – God and Communism.⁷ Communism, he said, is “the vision of man without God.” It was man’s second oldest faith: “Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” These were the “irreconcilable opposites – God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.”⁸

Liberals chose Man. Conservatives chose God. The struggle between the two great faiths was the subtext of every great political conflict in America in the second half of the twentieth century. It was this conflict that fueled the Chambers-Hiss hearings, “McCarthysim,” Vietnam, Watergate, and the elites’ abiding hatred for Ronald Reagan. At the end of the century, and against the odds, the free world won. 

(Coulter 2003, 8-9)

In his own way, Nixon was as crucial as Reagan in defeating Soviet Communism. Nixon exposed the Truman and Roosevelt administrations as having appointed known saboteur Alger Hiss to positions of influence within the government. The Hiss case marked the point at which liberals became conscious of themselves as a conspiracy. There was no turning back. Nixon showed the American people that liberals had failed to meet the challenge of Communist espionage in the highest reaches of government. No matter how many Harvard men spoke on Hiss’s behalf, liberals could not stave off the moment of truth. Naturally, therefore, they engaged in lying to ward off Nixon’s exposure of Hiss, just as they would again a half century later to save Clinton. 

The Republican Party would fail to meet other challenges – there was a reason for liberal political hegemony in the decades preceding the Hiss affair. But with the Hiss case, Nicon created a new universe. He had exposed liberals as dupes of totalitarianism. The Democratic Party could never be trusted again in the same way. Democrats and Republicans ceased being viewed as uniformly American. For this, liberals would never forgive Nixon. Watergate would be the left’s ultimate revenge against him for telling the truth about Hiss. 

…The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinsim. Liberals weren’t cowering in fear during the mCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy’s name. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis’. They scream about the dark night of fascism under McCarthy to prevent Americans from ever noticing the liberals sabotaged their own country. As Whittaker Chambers said: “Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Gult does.”⁹

At the time, everyone knew liberals were lying. But after a half century of liberal mythmaking, it would be Judgment Day for liberals on July 11, 1995. On that day, the U.S. government released a cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy’s charges. It was a mind-boggling discovery, Professors would be forced to retract their theses about the extent of Soviet espionage. Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, even American journalist I.F. Stone were exposed as agents of Moscow. And yet, most people reading this book are hearing about the Venona Project for the very first time. The release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times. It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of “McCarthyism.” They were not so innocent after all, it turns out. 

Soviet spies in the government were not a figment of right-wing imaginations. McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. He was tilting at an authentic Communist conspiracy that had been laughed off by the Democratic Party. 

(Coulter 2003, 9-11)

President Roosevelt had been warned repeatedly over the course of a decade that Hiss was a Doviet spy, but continued to promote Hiss to positions of greater influence. Hiss had been at President Roosevelt’s side at Yalta, where Roosevelt notoriously handed over Poland to Stalin. Britain and France had started World War II over Poland, but at Yalta Roosevelt cavalierly relinquished Poland to another totalitarian despot. The man advising Roosevelt during this transaction was Alger Hiss, Soviet agent. 

Truman kept Hiss on as director of the Office of Political Affairs at the State Department. Hiss supervised the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which helped create the United Nations, and he later served as secretary general of the San Francisco Conference, which drafted the United Nations Charter. In a final gift to his country, the Soviet spy bequeathed us the United Nations. 

(Coulter 2003, 27)

A half century later, when the only people who call themselves Communists are harmless cranks, it is difficult to grasp the importance of McCarthy’s crusade. But there’s a reason “Communist” now sounds about as threatening as “monarchist” – an it’s not because of intrepid New York Times editorials denouncing McCarthy and praising Harvard-educated Soviet spies. McCarthy made it a disgrace to be a Communist. Domestic Communism could never recover. 

(Coulter 2003, 33)

Conservatives could never catch up with the outburst of liberal indignation. They didn’t care as much as liberals did. No one could. Confronted with hysterical zealots demanding that their view of history be acknowledged, conservatives essentially said, Fine, if it means that much to you – okay, fine, the human spirit was crushed by Joe McCarthy. 

The moment you concede some small point to liberals, they go to work building an enormous elaborate edifice on top of the first lie. 

(Coulter 2003, 74)

Flip through any book about McCarthy and notice the footnotes. It is an arresting fact that the supporting documentation rarely consists of primary source material. Academics cite other academics, who cite other academics, with nearly all statements about McCarthy eventually tracing their way back to contemporaneous news accounts from a rabidly anti-McCarthy press. Doing original research on McCarthy is apparently not tenure-track material at American universities. As the saying goes, the first draft of history is written by journalists. And we know who they are. They told us Clinton was only counseling Monica. But trust them on McCarthy. The news industry is the last place you’d go for the truth about McCarthy. 

(Coulter 2003, 96)

Vietnam is merely part of a great heritage of Democratic foreign policy disasters. President Kennedy allowed brave Cubans to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and the double-crossed them  at the last minute by refusing to provide air cover. Because of President Kennedy’s failure of nerve, thousands of Cuban liberators were slaughtered or imprisoned by Castro. But at least America didn’t look like a cowboy! Kennedy’s failure of will at the Bay of Pigs made a greater confrontation with the Soviet Union inevitable. In short order, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall and sent  nukes to Cuba, nearly leading to World War III. The Russians would never have dared to take advantage of Nicon by delivering nuclear missiles to Cuba, but even stupid people are cunning enough to smell cowardice, and Kennedy had just backed down from a confrontation with a tin-pot dictator. Liberals hail Kennedy as a hero for being able to navigate his way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, neglecting to mention that it was a crisis of his own making. 

(Coulter 2003, 126)

Time and again, Democrats’ gutless pusillanimity has emboldened America’s enemies and terrified its allies. President Carter allowed Americans to be held by Iranian savages for 444 days. He ordered a poorly conceived rescue attempt that crashed a helicopter in the desert and killed six brave members of the Delta Force. In the war on terrorism, Democrats purported to oppose military action against Iraq if anyone in the military might get hurt. But they don’t mind inept commanders in chief who dishonor the military by ordering suicide missions. Carter’s pacifist secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, was indignant about the very idea of attempting a rescue and resigned after the failed rescue attempt. He preferred sticking with the Democrat strategy of doing nothing in response to brutal foreigners taking Americans hostage. In another show of America’s force in the world, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Carter responded by boycotting the Olympics. And thus was a fearsome blow struck at little fourteen-year-old American girls who had spent their lives training for the Olympics. 

(Coulter 2003, 127)

Despite the left’s relentless effort to dishearten the nation, vast majorities of Americans consistently supported the Vietnam War. The myth that an anti-war movement swept the nation is preposterous. Liberals always make themselves look more popular in historical accounts than they were at the time – with the exception of the McCarthy period, when they act as if they were at constant risk of extermination. Right up until our imminent withdrawal from Vietnam, no more than 20 percent of Americans ever opposed the war in Vietnam. Contrary to hagiographic descriptions of youthful onanists smoking pot and listening to the White Album in their Berkely dorm rooms, even the Worst Generation wasn’t so bad after all. The under-thirty-five crowd supported the Vietnam War more than those over thirty-five. Support for war was strongest among young white males.¹⁰

(Coulter 2003, 130)

It’s interesting how, in their endless reminiscing about Vietnam, the Iranian hostage crisis, or Black Hawk Down, liberals tend to shy away from mentioning who was president. … Liberals treat a war started by Kennedy, lost by Johnson, and ended honorably by Nixon as a Republican war. Here’s a little secret academics may not have mastered in their exhaustive study of U.S. history: Forty-nine states reelected Nicon in 1972. It wasn’t because they thought he was doing a lousy job in Vietnam. 

(Coulter 2003, 139)

The New York Times stylebook expressed contempt for the idea of winning the Cold War by requiring these words to be placed in quote marks: “superiority,” “win,” “evil empire,” “freedom-fighters,” “soft” (on Communism), and “backing down.”¹¹ This was in contradistinction to precise adjectives like “warmonger,” “unwinnable conflict,” “dangerous,” or “simple-minded” – none of which took quotes. 

(Coulter 2003, 158)

In early December 2001, 60 Minutes host Steve Kroft interviewed Mineta about his approach to securing the airlines from terrorist attack. Kroft observed that of twenty-two men currently on the FBI’s most-wanted list, “all but one of them has complexion listed as olive. They all have dark hair and brown eyes. And more than half of them have the name Mohammed.” Thus, he asked Mineta if airport security should give more scrutiny to someone named Mohammed – “just going down a manifest list: Bob, Paul, John, Frank, Steven Mohammed.”¹² The secretary of transportation said, “No.” In fact, Mineta was mystified by Kroft’s question, asking him, “Why should Mohammed be singled out?” The Federal Aviation Administration had a computer profiling system on passengers, but it actually excluded mention of passengers’ race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. (What does it have?)

Mineta explained that airport security was able to consider other more important factors than race, including asking “things like, ‘Did you pay cash for this ticket or charge it on a credit card? Do you have a one-way ticket or a round-trip?’” Kroft asked the relevant follow-up question: “Did the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center have one-way tickets?” No, Mineta said, the terrorist hijackers all had round-trip tickets they bought with credit cards. So the factors airport security was allowed to consider would not have stopped the 9-11 attack, and the factors that could have prevented the 9-11 attacks were required to be ignored. 

(Coulter 2003, 263-264)

“Does anyone really want a security official to hesitate before stopping a suspicious passenger out of fear of an accusation of bias?” Yes, in fact. There were precisely two groups of people who desperately wanted airport security to be browbeaten into giving suspicious passengers a pass: terrorists and Democrats. 

Even the Supreme Court was never this crazy. To the contrary, in a 1975 case called United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, the Court held that the “Mexican appearance” of a car’s occupants could be considered by border police stopping cars near the Mexican border to look for illegal aliens. This was back in the halcyon days when the Court was inventing new and preposterous “rights” every other day. But even that Court didn’t invent a right to have one’s ethnic appearance ignored by law enforcement. Rather, the Court noted, “The government has estimated that 85 percent of the aliens illegally in the country are from Mexico.” 

(Coulter 2003, 264-265)

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References

Coulter, Ann H. 2003. Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. N.p.: Crown Forum.

ISBN 1-4000-5030-8

1.  Phil Gailey, “Bush Campaign Takes a Disturbing Turn with Attacks on Patriotism,” St. Petersburg Times, September 11,1988. ↩︎
2.  Peter Applebome, New York Times, October 30,1988. ↩︎
3. David Nyhan, “A Tide of Hysteria Rolls in on Dukakis,” Boston Globe, September 20, 1988. ↩︎
4. Phil Gailey, “Bush Campaign Takes a Disturbing Turn with Attacks on Patriotism,” St. Petersburg Times, September 11,1988. ↩︎
5. Phil Gailey, “Bush Campaign Takes a Disturbing Turn with Attacks on Patriotism,” St. Petersburg Times, September 11,1988. ↩︎
6. Phil Gailey, “Bush Campaign Takes a Disturbing Turn with Attacks on Patriotism,” St. Petersburg Times, September 11,1988. ↩︎
7.  Whittaker Chambers, Witness, New York: Random House, 1952, p. 7. ↩︎
8.   Whittaker Chambers, Witness, New York: Random House, 1952, p. 16. Before ascending to heaven Christ said, “And ye shall be witnesses unto me … unto the uttermost part of the earth,” Acts 1:8. ↩︎
9.  Whittaker Chambers, Witness, p. 537. (“Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: “My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like for you will find nothing.’ That is the tone of innocence.” ↩︎
10.  Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 637 ↩︎
11.  Richard J. Barnet, “America Goes It Alone,” New York Times, October 23, 1985; and Tom Wicker, “A Game of Chicken,” New York Times, September 30, 1983. ↩︎
12.  Steve Kroft, “That Dirty Little Word ‘Profiling’; Pros and Cons of Profiling Arab-American Men at Airports After the September 11th Attacks,” 60 Minutes, CBS News, December 2, 2001. ↩︎