All Mouth and No Brain

Ann Coulter is an expert on slander. Slander, after all, was the title of her second book, in which she hurls the word at virtually every member of the mainstream American media. More than that, she was not so far from it herself in a speech sponsored by the Harvard Republican Club in Sever Hall on Saturday. A year after she famously proposed that the U.S. deport all Muslim aliens unless they agreed to spy on Muslim citizens for the government, Coulter this weekend revealed that her political delusions and attack-dog style are virtually unchanged. The title of this year’s speech: “Liberalism and Terrorism: Two Stages of the Same Disease.” Call me Osama, but some people might find this overly simplistic.

Given her past remarks, it is less than shocking that Coulter vigorously supports the Bush administration’s plans to depose Saddam Hussein. If anything, the spectacle in Sever actually showed that Coulter’s hatred of Muslims has tempered (or at least been submerged). Rather than suggesting that the United States “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” as she did a year ago, Coulter now believes that America will wipe out “70 percent” of global terrorism by invading Iraq alone.

But what’s to be done on the domestic front?

“I have another solution,” Coulter offered, halfway through a scattered speech which actually did very little to elucidate just how liberals and terrorists are suffering from the same disease. “It’s a little something I like to call racial profiling.” According to Coulter, racial profiling at airports is such a foolproof measure against terrorism that only a paper like the “Treason Times”—also occasionally referred to as The New York Times—would be so unpatriotic as to publish editorials against it.

Despite the fact that intelligence reports deem it unlikely that al-Qaeda will launch its next attack using the methods employed on Sept. 11, Coulter remains adamant that racial profiling marks the major battleground over national security between Republicans and their Democratic-terrorist rivals. The prospect of war against Iraq is apparently another self-evident matter—except for those notorious traitors in the Hezbollah-loving, America-hating Democratic party.

Let the record show, by the way, that members of the Harvard Republican Club ecstatically loved all this, applauding each time Coulter socked it to those commie, er, terrorist liberals. The Republican Club members in attendance laughed uproariously as Coulter laid into left-leaning colleges such as Harvard. One wonders why, if Harvard is so jam-packed with liberal idiots and traitors, the enlightened members of the Republican Club chose to attend? (And why, for that matter, did the consistently hypocritical Coulter go to Cornell? To bring salvation to the traitorous liberal hordes?)

No time for such questions, of course—Coulter is a busy woman with a book to hawk. And she had better move, too. There’s just no time for real political discourse when a person has a completely one-dimensional worldview to promote. Real political discourse means acknowledging the complexities of a situation—even if that means resisting the urge to say things like “alleged civil liberties claims have only one goal: to cushion terrorists.” Likewise, it means confronting the fact that the decision to invade Iraq should not be entered into lightly. Were Coulter to read a treason-free paper like the Wall Street Journal, she might discover that even some documented non-liberals such as Brent Scrowcroft, national security advisor to the first President Bush, have questioned the wisdom of such an attack.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before Coulter learns how to consider political and diplomatic questions as nuanced as these, she’ll have to learn one general rule—not all who disagree with her are terrorists.