Meghan McCain vs. Ann Coulter - What's up with that?

[oldiebutgoodie]

Meghan McCain wrote in her blog that Ann Coulter perpetuates negative stereotypes about Republicans. Ms. McCain writes, "I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party."

She asks, "Is she for real or not?" and puts forth the notion that Ann Coulter is deliberately outrageous so as to boost her book sales.

She also said, "And what was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election? If you truly have the GOP’s best interests at heart, how can you possibly justify telling an audience of millions that a Democrat would be a better leader than the Republican presidential candidate?"

McCain says that "even after losing the election, I find myself more drawn to GOP ideals and wanting to fight for the party’s resurgence. And if figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off, then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well."

Is Meghan McCain right - does Ann Coulter do more harm than good to the Republican Party, especially to the opinions and loyalties of younger Republicans? Or is Meghan McCain totally off-base because, after all, no mere pundit or media hound could ever be taken seriously as a leader or The Voice of the Republican, or any, political party?

Is this much ado about nothing or does the Republican Party really need to give some care to their public image?

[nonesuche]

Well on the flip side the same could be said for Pelosi who I feel is a pure embarrassment due to her rampant blind ambition and ruthlessness. I don't care for Ann Coulter either but I see she and Pelosi as equally offensive.

[LouiseVargas]

I adore Ann Coulter. She is intelligent and beautiful and moves with grace through her various topics.

[oldiebutgoodie]

I adore Ann Coulter. She is intelligent and beautiful and moves with grace through her various topics.

Given that Ann Coulter has every right to hold whatever opinion she holds and to free expression of same, is she a true friend of the Republican Party or does she do damage to the Republican cause by being as insulting and abrasive and even as buffoonish as possible and making public shows of support for a Democratic Presidential candidate over the Republican candidate?  Which loyalty is a higher priority for Ms. Coulter -- her political party or her book sales?

[nonesuche]

It's an ugly thing to say out loud but I can promise you Ann and Pelosi are both in this 'game' for personal gain, however, Ann isn't an elected official.

Pelosi launched her book tour in August of 2008 and used "let's impeach Bush" as her tag line to gain visibility for her book tour, but you are questioning Coulter's motivations?

That wasn't for personal gain? Was it even appropriate to use her book tour as a bully pulpit to impeach the sitting president? The speaker of the house doing a book tour during company hours? On our time and our dime? During an election year no less as our economy was slipping off a cliff?

I have a much much bigger issue with Pelosi's book tour than I do Ann Coulter's book promotion.

[oldiebutgoodie]

Pelosi launched her book tour in August of 2008 and used "let's impeach Bush" as her tag line to gain visibility for her book tour, but you are questioning Coulter's motivations?

Bush, top aides apparently home free

WASHINGTON -- Can Americans face the truth about the Bush administration's abuse of power?

I believe so, but clearly President Barack Obama and some Democratic lawmakers think they can't. Or possibly they don't want to be bogged down in a search which could be viewed as vindictive against the former regime. Too bad.

Obama -- a former constitutional law professor-- has ruled out a look backward, claiming that any review of possible illegalities by Bush and his coterie would lead to "politics that have made Washington dysfunctional."

Picking up on the last Bush mantra that we should move "forward," Obama with his don't-rock-the-boat perspective is not about to nail his predecessor. After all, Obama is now a member of the club and shows signs of fitting in very quickly and easily.

President Richard M. Nixon had a more courageous opposition in the form of the Democratic-led impeachment drive that led to his resignation in disgrace.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., quickly took any discussion of Bush impeachment off the table because she feared such a prosecution would disrupt the Democratic legislative agenda.

[...]

Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, are the few congressional leaders who have the courage to say in effect: "Stop the music. We can't go forward until we have a clear understanding of what travesties were perpetrated by the Bush administration."

They reflect the view of philosopher George Santayana that if we do not remember the past we are condemned to repeat it in the future.

But we're not talking about grand jury indictments here.

Leahy is proposing the creation of a "truth-finding panel" designed "to get to the bottom of what happened --and why -- to make sure it never happens again."

Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: "For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib (the notorious prison near Baghdad), the disclosure of torture memos and the revelation of warrantless surveillance of Americans."

He noted that some political leaders "say do nothing." A few senators even tried to make Attorney General Eric Holder promise in his confirmation hearings that he would not prosecute anyone for Bush-era lawbreaking.

MORE...

[nonesuche]

Pelosi was the first to bring possible impeachment to the table as early as 2006...

"Some House Democrats, including ranking Judiciary Committee member John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, have called for impeachment hearings into allegations that Bush misled the nation about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and that he violated federal law by approving warrantless wiretaps on Americans. In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Pelosi said a Democratic-controlled House would launch investigations of the administration on energy policy and other matters. She said impeachment would not be a goal of the investigations, but she added: "You never know where it leads to." "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/11/AR2006051101950.html

In essence Pelosi as speaker did the classic tease. The senior republicans confronted her regarding it, so she backs down, for a moment.

For over a year Pelosi was completely coy about the issue, she opened the door for the democrats to throw out impeaching Bush and in her carefully evasive answers she ensures that issue is kept on the table - to the degree that Cindy Sheehan challenges Pelosi openly to either impeach Bush or she will run against Pelosi. There is a plethora of press around this, not that Sheehan could have unseated Pelosi but it was a clear challenge that many of the most liberal Democrats wanted presented to Pelosi.

You open Pandora's box as Pelosi did and doggone it, you deserve to have that tossed back at you.

Her own base of voter support wavered somewhat due to her having opened that box and then not walked clearly through that door. It was a question in nearly every interview Pelosi had in 2007 and 2008. It would take hours to post all the links but even on the View, she was evasive to the degree that Joy Behar took issue with her waffling.

Then her carefully orchestrated plan begins to backfire on her, more were interested in Sheehan's challenge and Pelosi's waffling on impeachment, than her book which by the way had dismal sales.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing a media tour, touting her new book, "Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters." On Monday night she sat down for a Q&A with Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller inside the awkwardly named TheTimesCenter, an auditorium connected to the paper's headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Book flacks aggressively marketed Pelosi's autobiography at the entrance, politely pressuring ticket holders even before their tickets were scanned (Pelosi was doing a book signing after the Q&A). In other words, the Democratic Speaker of the House was selling and signing books at NYT Co.

The conversation itself consisted of a lot more of Pelosi's A's than NYT Q's, as the Speaker filibustered through a series of mostly sympathetic questions from Bumiller (the first half especially more closely resembled a friendly Sunday morning TV book interview than any exercise in news-gathering).

The onstage chemistry between the two, alone on stage in the 378-seat auditorium, was polite but not effusive. The audience, in the heart of liberal Manhattan, was definitely on her side: Pelosi managed to wring applause lines from Democratic boilerplate like defending public schools (yeah!), women earning only 70 cents to the dollar of men (boo!), and  Bush  leaving office soon (yeah yeah yeah!).

Bumiller's initial questions were tailored to Pelosi's bean-counting feminism:

Bumiller: I should say, you say in your book, that 22% of elected officials in the world are women, while in the United States it's only 17%. So what's been holding us back in this, this most advanced country in the world?

Even when Bumiller departed from the book's topics and quizzed Pelosi on purely political issues, she didn't raise a challenging questions about the success of the troop surge, but instead led off with one of the top items on the left-wing's wish list:

Bumiller: I'm going to ask you a question that you get asked all the time, I'll get it out of the way. Actually, I'm going to ask it in a different way. Do you think that the way that President Bush took the nation to war was an impeachable offense?

Pelosi didn't answer for several seconds, as applause filled the auditorium. A full 15 seconds after the question, Pelosi responded by demurring, saying, "Let me say it another way." (Before the 2006 elections Pelosi caused angst among Democrats by saying that impeachment was "off the table.") She filibustered, giving a laundry list of talking points causing Bumiller to query: "Is that a yes?"

At least twice during the talk, Pelosi recited the left-wing myth that the middle class have had their riches extracted and given to the upper 1% under Bush, which evidently now controls 24% of U.S. assets.

Bumiller sounded almost apologetic when she challenged Pelosi on offshore drilling, even couching it in the terms of "playing devil's advocate":

Bumiller: What do you say to those who say this is a very critical part of our energy security, it's safer now, we're drilling many, many miles offshore, you can't see them offshore, this is crucial to us, gas prices are $4 a gallon, I'm playing devil's advocate.

Pelosi: I understand.

Bumiller: So what is your -- this is a growing view, as you know.

Bumiller posed one other semi-critical question from the right, challenging Pelosi for blocking a free trade agreement with Colombia, even after President Uribe's rescue of U.S. hostages from the FARC terrorist group.

When she'd used up her questions, Bumiller read from a sheet of queries submitted by the audience, including a vague one asking Pelosi to compare liberal vs. conservative media bias. In response, Pelosi warned about the White House "echo chamber" resonating "across the radical right-wing."

Another Pelosi quote brought up the Fairness Doctrine:

Pelosi: [Right-wingers] saw an opportunity, came out of the White House, the biggest platform in the world, there's nothing that can compare to the bully pulpit of the President of the United States, and that echo chamber across America is on talk radio and the rest, which came forth because of the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine.

The Fairness Doctrine, which could come up for renewal under a Democratic Congress and White House, would require broadcasters to air both sides of controversial issues, which would serve to impose onerous government regulations on conservative-dominated talk radio. MRC has more on this important matter here.


 

When it takes Pelosi 15 minutes to respond to a question and the interviewer still needing to ask "is that a yes?" is pure unadulterated runaround.

I do not think Pelosi ever thought that she could impeach Bush but I do think in one of her boldest moments of blind ambition, she threw it out there to start the fire. Then she refused to be definitive and even democrats began calling her on it.

Yep, she got a ton of mileage out of it when eventually even she admitted, she had no evidence of an impeachable crime.

[oldiebutgoodie]

Quote from: nonesuche on March 11, 2009, 07:35:37 AM

Pelosi launched her book tour in August of 2008 and used "let's impeach Bush" as her tag line to gain visibility for her book tour, but you are questioning Coulter's motivations?

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., quickly took any discussion of Bush impeachment off the table because she feared such a prosecution would disrupt the Democratic legislative agenda.

Better now? I was simply making a point for clarity's sake as to Speaker Pelosi's stated position on the subject of impeachment. I don't care about her book or her speaking engagements or all that rot.

You made a statement that was, in part, somewhat inaccurate. Pelosi did NOT use "Impeach Bush" as her tag line. To the contrary, she had to face down a firestorm of protest from Democrats who were like sharks smelling blood in the water but she forced her will and there was no impeachment.

As mentioned in the article I already quoted, other lawmakers are now forming a "truth commission" and their targets so far seem to be a few officials of the Bush Administration such as Karl Rove and Harriet Miers who will be legally required to testify. I am not aware that former President Bush has been summoned to appear.

Pelosi may have alluded to the truth commission in some recent comments but that is a far, far cry from using "Impeach Bush" as a "tag line" as you stated.

I merely sought clarity. I don't care about the rest of it.

[nonesuche]

  it's okay, I am accustomed to diehard democrats on this thread

But I care about how she manipulated the impeachment issue and was so very coy hoping to get mileage out of it.

But then I care about those fine points and motivations 

[oldiebutgoodie]

it's okay, I am accustomed to diehard democrats on this thread

But I care about how she manipulated the impeachment issue and was so very coy hoping to get mileage out of it.

But then I care about those fine points and motivations 

You may have missed my numerous posts where I state quite clearly that I am neither Democrat or Republican. I don't subscribe to anyone's talking points. I think for myself and so I am an Independent.

[nonesuche]

In light of the continuing condescension in your posts to me, perhaps it's best we just not respond to one another's posts. That is the clear issue for me, thanks !