Go listen. A blog called The Right Scoop is hosting the audio file of commentator Mark Levin’s 30-minute line-by-line demolition of the omissions, diversions, bad logic and lies of Anne Coulter’s column “Three Cheers for Romneycare.”
“Romneycare is not so bad as socialist progenitors of Obamacare go; and besides, Romney just couldn’t help it” is the essence of Coulter’s deliberately fact-light, fallacy-heavy exoneration of the ex-governor.
Anne Coulter can be fun to read or watch in carefully curated instances; for example, when taking on the left in blunt face-to-face confrontations, she often seems fearless in expressing what she really really thinks, both gutsy and honest in slamming noxious but fashionable nonsense.
But Coulter has also often been dishonest in the service of a partisan or religio-philosophical agenda. The fact that her leftist antagonists like to strain so hard to misread her has obscured the pragmatism of her own until-now often more sophisticated rhetorical lashes. (As an example of the religio-philosophical agenda, see Coulter’s 2006 credo Godless: The Church of Liberalism, with its deliberate misrepresentations of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Dogmatic faith in ineffable and imponderable unknowables is indeed a religionistic feature of secular leftism and other secular and oppressive isms. So why not advocate and practice an alternative to both: reason?) Despite the disconcerting rapidity of Coulter’s shameless embrace of lefty rationalizations and shibboleths for the sake of advancing her preferred candidate, then, the latest brouhaha is nothing new. The column rebutted by Levin is merely more of the same, only faster and harder and more unalloyed, and therefore more difficult to ignore or find excuses for.
Coulter’s conduct in writing “Three Cheers for Romneycare” does seem to represent a new low. Passing itself off as an act of needle-threading bold defiance, it is really one of slovenly and craven appeasement. Maybe that’s why Levin seems so upset, so sad as well as so angry. Mark Levin calls Anne Coulter a friend, and has presumably regarded her as a valiant comrade in arms in the battle for liberty. It must be distressing to see her pimping for pinko-ism.
