Waffling Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter talks tough, but only in print. She refused to talk tough when it came time to talk.
She was invited to Berkeley. She made a lot of noise about it. Then, when push threatened to come to shove, she wimped out.
I am not impressed with the lady at all. I never have been. She has an acidic tongue, but that’s not enough to make it in the world of political commentary. You have to have the guts to back up your tongue. She does not have this. She is not a female Pat Buchanan. She is basically a Right-wing Gloria Steinem. She’s not as good-looking as Steinem was, but she is funnier. Both of them converted their blonde hair and legs into a media career.
I have kept my mouth shut about her for 15 years, but it’s time to call a spade a spade. The woman is tough verbally, but a wimp personally.
When she backed out of her speech at Berkeley, I realized that she really does not understand politics. This was a tremendous opportunity to embarrass the far-Left crazies. I wrote about this in March. The best possible tactic that a conservative can use against the Left today is to let these crazy people act just as crazy as they are willing to act. The public is fed up. The more we can show that these people are off-the-wall whining nut cases, the better it is for the conservative movement. She has not figured this out. If you can’t figure this out, you don’t understand politics. You surely don’t understand strategy.
This woman is no Saul Alinsky. Anyone who is not the equivalent of Alinksy should get out of the limelight on the issues of practical political action.
I understood this in the fall of 1964 during the Berkeley free speech protests. I was a student at the University of California, Riverside. I had nothing but contempt for the spineless bureaucrats in Berkeley who did not back up Dean of Students Katharine Towle’s decision, required by University of California rules, to close access to the socialist organizers on campus property. University President Clark Kerr did not expel the protesters. He waffled. She did not. She was a retired Marine colonel. Clark Kerr was a wimp. This has been Berkeley’s administrative tradition for over half a century. The Left buffaloes the university into capitulation.
It’s okay to be a wimp. Almost all bureaucrats are wimps. Most people don’t want confrontation. They will go out of their way to avoid confrontation. Here is my complaint: wimps should stop talking tough. I get tired of wimps who talk tough. But that’s what most of the conservative movement has been ever since December 7, 1941. They talk tough, but when push comes to shove, they fold.
Ron Paul was the exception. He did not talk tough, but he did not fold.
“THE WALL, THE WALL!”
Coulter now says that Trump had better not back down regarding the wall. She is living in fantasyland. Trump is going to back down on the wall. He has backed down on everything else. He is going to sell out his supporters on this, just as he has on NAFTA.
This is what all Presidents do. All of them. Anyone who fails to understand this fails to understand American politics.
Republicans are both corrupt and stupid, so it’s hard to tell which one animates their opposition to the wall. But the Democrats are bluffing. They’re trying to get the GOP to fold before they show us their pair of threes.Now that Trump has capitulated on even asking for funding for a wall, the Democrats are on their knees saying, “Thank you, God! Thank you, God!”
No politician wants to have to explain a vote against the wall. What the Democrats want is for Trump to be stuck explaining why he didn’t build the wall.
Then it will be a bloodbath. Not only Trump, but also the entire GOP, is dead if he doesn’t build a wall. Republicans will be wiped out in the midterms, Democrats will have a 300-seat House majority, and Trump will have to come up with an excuse for why he’s not running for re-election.
The New York Times and MSNBC are not going to say, “We are so impressed with his growth in office, we’re going to drop all that nonsense about Russia and endorse the Republican ticket!”
No, at that point, Trump will be the worst of everything.
No one voted for Trump because of the “Access Hollywood” tape. They voted for him because of his issues; most prominently, his promise to build “a big beautiful wall.” And who’s going to pay for it? MEXICO!
You can’t say that at every campaign rally for 18 months and then not build a wall.
Do not imagine that a Trump double-cross on the wall will not destroy the Republican Party. Oh, we’ll get them back. No, you won’t. Trump wasn’t a distraction: He was the last chance to save the GOP.
Millions of Americans who hadn’t voted in 30 years came out in 2016 to vote for Trump. If he betrays them, they’ll say, “You see? I told you. They’re all crooks.”
No excuses will work. No fiery denunciations of the courts, the Democrats or La Raza will win them back, even if Trump comes up with demeaning Twitter names for them.
It would be an epic betrayal — worse than Bush betraying voters on “no new taxes.” Worse than LBJ escalating the Vietnam War. There would be nothing like it in the history of politics.
He’s the commander in chief! He said he’d build a wall. If he can’t do that, Trump is finished, the Republican Party is finished, and the country is finished.
I see. The country is finished if Trump does not build a wall.
How can anyone believe such nonsense? The absence of a wall is not going to finish this country or the Republican Party. The country is growing in population. America is the richest large nation in history. It is likely to remain the richest large nation for the next half century, and probably longer.
This country has been bedeviled for a century by people who believe that politics is fundamental to the life of a nation, but it has survived and prospered despite such nonsense.
Politics is not central to the life of a free nation. It is mostly a sideshow. Family life, church life, business, entertainment, culture in general: these are the heart of every society. This is what philosophical conservatism has taught, beginning with Edmund Burke. The culture war is real, and good people have been losing it. Politics is an aspect of this loss, but it is not now, nor has it ever been, front and center except in outright dictatorships, none of which has survived for long in the West. The Progressives denied this. The Left in general has denied this. Conservatives had better affirm it.
The heart of civil government is the bureaucracy. I don’t mean the so-called Deep State. I mean the Civil Service-protected army of bureaucrats who regulate our lives. These are the people who post 80,000 pages of three-column fine print every year in the Federal Register. This is the heart of civil government today. Conservatives and libertarians alike should get this straight, or else we will lose the war for liberty: administrative law is the main threat to liberty today, all over the West. This was stated magnificently by Harold Berman in his fearful Introduction to Law and Revolution (1983). Politics has little to do with administrative law. It barely touches it. Only one thing can stop the relentless expansion of the administrative stateit: government bankruptcy. That event is coming. The unfunded liabilities of Medicare and social Security guarantee it.
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