Iconoclasm 201

I'm finally listening to Treason, by Ann Coulter. I never picked it up because I thought it would be a silly screed. I thought I wouldn't enjoy listening to hours of angry diatribe, even if I agreed with the substance of the argument. Then I saw the documentary Is It True What They Say About Ann? I've read her columns, but I'd never seen her in action. I was surprised and impressed. She's not even a little bit angry. Even as she's saying the most outrageous things, she has a barely suppressed smile on her face. I suspect she's shockingly blunt and oh so clever as a way of drawing attention to her arguments.

But what made me run to the library for the audio version of Treason was a clip of her destroying Bill O'Reilly(?) by leading him to agree that McCarthy was horrible for instigating all that HUAC nastiness regarding Hollywood screenwriters and then casually pointing out that HUAC stands for The House UnAmerican Activities Committee, while McCarthy was generally referred to as Senator McCarthy, what with him being in the Senate and all. That's when I realized how precious little I knew about about the whole McCarthy era (if three years can be referred to as an era). And I'm not trusting George Clooney to enlighten me.

The McCarthy stuff is fascinating, but I already had a mini-epiphany on that during the controversy over awarding Elia Kazan an Oscar for Life-Time Achievement. That was the first time I ever heard anyone say that the people named before the committee really were communists. It is always implied, or said outright, that the committee was in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, searching relentlessly for enemies that weren't there and demanding that some sacrificial lamb be produced to satisfy there blood-lust. In fact, Hollywood was filled with communists working diligently for our implacable enemy. All Kazan had done was tell the truth under oath. And even that had nothing to do with McCarthy.

What's truly amazing is Coulter's attack on Truman's image as the first cold-warrior. I live 20 minutes from the Truman Library in Independence, MO and I have to wonder how popular Ann is around here anymore. We really love Harry in this neck of the woods. But I must admit that it never occurred to me that "containment" might not be an aggressive anti-communist stance (Ann: conservatives prefer victory to cowardly containment). I had no clue that the Army kept knowledge of the Venona Project to decode secret Soviet transmissions from Roosevelt and Truman because they couldn't be trusted not to leak to the Soviets that their code had been broken. How deeply embedded were Soviet spies in the US government? Well, let's just say that Stalin knew that we had the A-bomb before Truman did.

All that, and I'm only about half-way through.

Update: Bookworm links to this Coulter article on the George Clooney movie.