Very strange to read the normally sane and cogent Sam Tanenhaus going off the rails in Slate magazine. His argument seems to be that conservative critics of Ann Coulter secretly agree with her and have criticized her to deflect attention from their own closeted belief that all contemporary Democrats and liberals are traitors. He summarizes his cheap shot here:
Horowitz et al. are right [about Coulter], of course. But why are they so worked up? And why reach back so far to single out a few “good” liberals? This just reinforces Coulter’s argument that today’s breed can be dismissed as a single lumpen mass. In other words, they agree with her. So, why the outrage? Here’s a guess: Coulter’s conservative critics fear that her legions of fans-and lots of others, too-see no appreciable difference between her ill-informed comic diatribes and their high-brow ultraserious ones, particularly since Coulter’s previous performances were praised by some now on the attack.
Let me provide some other, less strained reasons for being exercized by Ann Coulter. Those of us who believe that, yes, some Democrats and leftists were traitors in the Cold War understand that the accusation is a very grave one and don’t want to see it used so broadly that it discredits the argument altogether. The difference between us and Coulter is that we want to make distinctions and she doesn’t. So in today’s Democratic Party, it’s vital to distinguish between the well-intentioned critiques of Howard Dean or John Kerry or Bob Graham and those crackpot Democratic activists on Democratic Underground or openly treasonous Columbia University professors who really do want to see the U.S. defeated in Iraq. This strikes me as a pretty critical distinction. My beef with many Democrats right now is not that they’re traitors of any kind but that they have got their perspective skewed; and they need to realize more strongly that we really are fighting truly bad guys out there and our president isn’t one of them. How weird that Tanenhaus should should somehow fail to see this distinction and paint diverse and serious writers like Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Horowitz as indistinguishable from Coulter. Isn’t that kind of broad brush exactly what Coulter is criticized for? The truth is: in this article, Tanenhaus is far closer to Coulter’s methods than any of the people he criticizes.
The Dish 