by NacGump
Good name for a "liberal" blog -- NotAnnCoulter -- because she emboies the exact opposite of the values that the embattled but noble term "liberal" represents.
There are five of these values in all, and they occur in a specific order.
PART ONE:
Honesty
No need to catalogue Coulter's lies, as they are well documented elsewhere, but more importantly, because the point isn't her specific lies, but that she seems to feel no requirement to be honest at all. Honesty, per se, just isn't the point. In Coulter's mind, everything is a tactic, everything Machiavellian, everything is a political thrust or parry, even, incredibly, the death of John and Elizabeth Edwards' son and Mrs. Edwards's breast cancer! We liberals, by contrast, must be honest.
For one thing, not only the overtly right-wing media, but also the corporate media in general, roasts a Michael Moore for the slightest twisting or cherry-picking of facts, while the likes of Dick Cheney (hmm ... "likes of Dick Cheney" must mean Darth Vader or Dr. Doom) can blithely continue to imply that Iraq was actively complicit in 9-11, that global warming is a myth, and so on, and the corporate media wimpers almost inaudibly while the right-wing media uses these statements in footnotes as if they were citing the Encyclopedia Britannica!
The other reason liberals must be honest is because we believe, most fundamentally, that we're all in this together -- we're certainly all dependent upon an increasingly fragile ecosystem -- and therefore we believe that lying hurts the liar just as much as it hurts anyone else.
No doubt there are philosophical debates worth having about "white" lies, and about the scale of lies -- I doubt even Ann Coulter really believes that lies regarding a consentual tryst are as serious as lies told about the causes for going into a war. But these philosophical niceties aren't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the old "I'd rather be right than president" attitude, that attitude which simply aknowledges that these matters are of too great importance to let one's political loyalties trump the truth.
Honesty is the essential ingredient of good citizenship, if I must state it in such a "civics class" manner. And the sad thing about someone like Ann Coulter is that she is so cynical and empty as a human being that there is no truth, only tactic, to be found in her. The sad thing about someone like George Bush is that he is so simple minded that he really does believe the majority of the nonsense he's been told to believe. The sad thing about someone like Dick Cheney is that there seems to be no Luke Skywalker or Fantastic Four available to defeat him and his super-powerful military-industrial death machine.
NEXT UP: Compassion
After that: Respect, Responsibility, and Courage
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