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Coulter represents ‘darkest side’ of American character, says Kennedy
(Kennedy-Speech)
Source: The Canadian Press
Mar 25, 2010 5:52
LONDON, Ont. _ American politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the U.S. has spent decades lost on a dark path that Canadians are in danger of following.
But he told an audience in London, Ont., Wednesday there’s hope for both countries if they end their reliance on information and energy from the large corporations threatening to take power from government.
Kennedy spoke at the University of Western Ontario three days after far-right pundit Ann Coulter spoke there as well.
He drew applause when he said “Ann Coulter really represents the darkest side of American character.”
Kennedy said Coulter and others in the far right don’t understand that without government, the country would be run by “unrestrained corporate power.”
That corporate power, he said, has made a mess of the economy and environment by converting natural resource into cash as quickly as possible. (London Free Press)
INDEX: NATIONAL POLITICS
Harper has the audacity to say that Michael was American..was Harper jelaous? He sure acts like Bush., more every day…… or more like the Teabaggers
The Kennedy boys are a lot more intelligent than Coulter ever will be.
All, you rightly note Ann Coulter’s hate speech (which is apparently an alleged crime in Canada, as many have noted). Now ask, should Ann Coulter be arrested or barred from Canada for making terrorist threats against a sovereign country?
Ask, would it be a crime in Canada to say to another person: you’d better hope I don’t kill you; you are lucky I allow you to live.
Is the following a terrorist threat against Canada:
Ann Coulter: “[Canada] better hope the United States doesn’t roll over one night and crush them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent.”
Eugene Parks;
Nobody from your side of the Rubicon has ever been able to explain to me how Coulter’s remark about the U.S. rolling over and crushing Canada is in any way different from P.E. Trudeau’s famous remark about doing business with the States is much like sleeping with an elephant, you never know when they might roll over. I gather Mr. Trudeau is a great hero among devotees of the Liberal Party. Am I wrong about this?
I find the two remarks identical, and quite true. Yet you would term her’s hate speech?
Please explain. Can anyone explain?
Perhaps it is because she implies that the rolling over may not be involuntary and is something considered.
There’s such a huge difference between a person who has a real cause to fight for (Kennedy and the environment) and a person who’s only cause is to raise hell so it can make her rich.
Sadly, some really gullible and not so bright people believe her.
Sandra;
Yes, the Kennedys have never been about money, have they? Why, they live like paupers.
I take RFK Jr.’s remark to be honest from his own point of view, that of the scion of a Democratic Party dynasty looking at somebody on the opposing team.
His father did some fine work for Joe McCarthy though, before the wind changed. Or perhaps I’m being uncharitable, because the Robert Sr. and his brother Jack were genuinely anti-communist, and the communists in the State Department were not as imaginary as the revisionists would have you believe.
But then, don’t take it from me. In your estimation I’m obviously not very bright. Not to mention that I’m gullible.
Joe:
Do you have a list of the communists in the State Department?
Derek;
The fall of the Soviet Union opened up intelligence files and revealed that Joe McCarthy, whom you dutifully mock, was in fact correct. Here is a small list of some prominent names of people who were, it turned out, communists:
Alger Hiss, who had been the number three man at the State Department behind Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk.
Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who purposely withheld allocated funding for the Chinese Nationalists, during their Civil War, that destroyed their currency and, thus, their efforts against Mao’s Communists.
Lauchlin Currie, Special Assistant to F.D.R. Samuel Dickstein, member of the House of Representatives from Brooklyn.
Lawrence Duggan, State Department Director of Latin American Affairs
Harold Ickes, Sr., father of Clinton’s impeachment flack, who was Secretary of the Interior. Finally,
William Weisband, U.S. Army Signal Security Agency.
Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Atom Bomb Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was not. But his wife, his brother, his mistress, and many of his associates at the U of California were.
Were there others? Yeah. About 10,000. McCarthy was correct. It’s all well documented in books available at your public library, and perhaps even in the library at Trent University.
Ann Coulter also provides a pretty useful summation of the whole period in her book ‘Treason’.
But you probably don’t read Coulter, do you?
Joe…I see you read a lot of right wing revisionist history.
Kennedy represents the leftist fringe of the ‘climate change’ cult. Of course he speaks for you.
Mark:
If you think RFK is in the “leftist fringe” of anything, you know zilch about American history. Ignorance is bliss…
Joe O’Neill – good grief, we all know about the Kennedy clan. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is his own man. He can’t be held responsible for family issues of over 40 or more years ago. George Bush’s grandfather was Hitler’s banker, should that be held against him?
Your argument is so old and tired and stupid.
Sandra;
I’m not, actually, holding RFK Jr. responsible for anything. I merely recalled the career of his father, which spanned from commie-hunter to dove in about a ten year period.
I was amused at your contrasting of the work of RFK Jr., who you see as a tireless crusader for good, with that of Ann Coulter, who you see as a money-grubbing poser, particularly in light of the wealth of the Kennedy clan.
I say Kennedy’s characterization of Coulter as part of the ‘dark side of America’ is just as hyperbolic as Coulter’s rhetoric, and is engendered by political partisanship.
I find a comparison of RFK Jr. with his father to be instructive, though.
Robert the elder was McCarthy’s right hand man when public opinion favoured ferreting out communists, ten years later he’d reinvented himself as a dove, perhaps to capitalize on the youth vote in the turbulent ’60s, then he was tragically murdered.
RFK Jr. is an environmental crusader. Is it true conviction or whatever way the wind blows?
Joe:
Who is this Alger Hiss! And Oppenheimer? These developments are shocking. Also those physicists can be very dangerous…
Too bad the red-fearing American government didn’t bother to listen to Albert Einstein when he warned the President of the United States that Adolf Hitler was developing an atomic bomb. For more on this, see David Bodanis, E=MC 2.
But seriously, since you raised the issue… What about the tens of thouands (perhaps millions) of people whose lives were unnecessarily altered or destroyed by the reckless demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy and the excesses of the FBI’s cross-dressing chaucerian fraud J. Edgar Hoover? Even some of the claims in the small handful of names you mention could be disputed. A handful of British intelligence operatives were discovered to be communists too. Does this mean the SAS and SIS were under the aegis of the “international communist conspiracy”? What about all those communists in the U.S. military? And George Marshall? President Eisenhower didn’t think too highly of these spurious accusations of disloyalty and should be applauded for archiving McCarthy (even if it was a bit too late). When he was finished with the rest of American society, McCarthy dug his talons into the US Army, but he didn’t fare so well. If your Mr. McCarthy was right, I suppose it is an outrage that many communist Army dentists were plying their trade in the Korean War. Had there been fewer root canals, maybe things would have been different at the 39th parallel!
It was never enough for the far right. They blamed the Democrats for the “loss” of China, and believed that Harry Truman lost the Korean War. To these blowhards, the only thing standing in the way of Douglas MacArthur and the full realization of manifest destiny was the “cowardly school of communist containment” led by Harry Truman and especially Dean Acheson. In reality, Truman and Acheson erected an unprecedented national security state with the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, implementation of NSC-68, military aid to the civil war-plagued Greece and Turkey, the reconstruction of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan aid, and the rebuilding of Japan along similar lines.
Another physicist whom you did not mention was one Linus Pauling, a good man was dragged through the mud in the 1950s and 1960s by HUAC and the Senate’s clone in the 1960s by the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws. Mr. Pauling’s SANE organization for responsible nuclear policy was unfairly smeared by fanatical Cold Warriors (including some Democrats), and because of this, the peace movement suffered damaging blows. Discussing how the counter-subversives attacked well meaning groups, Pauling famously noted that “If you want to suppress any movement or any organization in the USA you accuse them of being ‘pro-Communist’ or ‘infiltrated’ with Communism.” In this vein, check out the case of Owen Lattimore, a scholar whose life was destroyed by SISS, and witness who perjured themselves. In the end, Lattimore was never proven to be anything other than an academic who thought for himself, and was willing to question the orthodox assumptions underpinning American foreign relations in the Cold War.
None of the Internal Security Subcommittee’s “findings” were accepted by the executive branch. In fact, the hearings conducted by this committee were simply a vanity project for careerists in the anticommunist movement who profited from the cause. Whitaker Chambers, the famous “Witness” enjoyed a nice career writing puff pieces for the anti-communist front. Herbert Matthews, a New York Times reporter, was also a target of SISS, as the committee dragged his good name through the spin cycle without a shred of evidence. In the end, the subcommittee did not even have the guts to call Matthews to the stand. In Matthews’s he stated that he would have welcomed the opportunity to defend himself against SISS, but was pleased when the Kennedy administration (full of hawkish anticommunists) scoffed at the committee’s findings.
To be sure, RFK did exploit the communists in government issue. He also cleaved to anti-communist demagoguery when it looked like it would boost his political fortunes. But in the end, RFK had the courage to admit that the hawkishly anticommunist suprapartisan Cold War consensus was incorrect in many of its imperatives. It took the death of his brother, and a huge fissure in the Democratic Party for RFK to change course, but why should he be criticized for having the conviction to speak against an unjust war?
Joe, forty years ago, a person like Coulter would have been anathema to the Republican Party. Even people like your treasured Joe McCarthy would have found her too extreme. Look up people like John Sherman Cooper, Jacob Javitz, George Aiken, Lowell Weicker, Lincoln Chafee, Margaret Chase Smith, Leverett Saltonstall, and others, and you will see that they had nothing in common with a nut like Coulter. In fact, they probably would have run for the hills at the sight of her in any of their cloakrooms. The problem is that egregious individuals like Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Karl Rove now constitute a majority in the upper chambers of the Republican Party.
In reality, at Bata Library, the authors of most books on the topic almost unanimously argue that McCarthy was a harrowing figure in American society during the 1950s, and surmise that he cast a dark shadow on American culture and the U.S. Congress during his reign as the de-facto Orwellian leader of the forces of American anti-communism and counter-subversion. He needlessly ratched up fear, accused people of serious crimes with zero evidence to substantiate his allegations, and created a climate that mirrored what was present in the surveillance societies throughout the USSR.
And do I read Coulter? Sure. It is good to know how the real dangerous people out there think. If you brought up her book in any history or political science department in North America, the professors on both the right and left wing of the spectrum would laugh you out of the room. Her work would not be taken seriously. But it should be, as it influences people.
Thanks, Edward R. Murrow, but the fact remains that McCarthy was right about all those I listed being communists, including the number three man in the State Department.
McCarthy was right. Chambers was right. Hiss was a perjurer and a communist.
So why is ‘McCarthyism’ an epithet? Why do people speak of ‘Cold War Paranoia’. It would be paranoia if there had been no communists and spies in the State Department.
But, as the fall of the Soviet Union has confirmed, the American government was rife with them.
And the Rosenbergs were guilty too.
Your position would be impossible to categorically dismiss had the wall not fallen. But it did.
Of course Ann Coulter is a dangerous writer to those whose mistaken world view she threatens.
Damn, I wish there were some style edit capabilities on this platform! I’ll think of that next time before writing such a long-winded post.
I didn’t say RFK Derek, I said his boy Jr. His dad would have disowned him had he survived to see the farce his son has become. RFK knew what real evil was and fought against it. His boy is a hack wanna-be scientist who seeks to thwart hundreds of years of progress with his hippie ‘climate change’ bullshit.
Mark:
I knew you meant Junior, and my comment stands. You are a master clarvoyant though aren’t you? You can even read a dead Bobby Kennedy’s mind. I would argue that we don’t know what RFK would have thought. But it is possible he’d be proud of his boy, who has fought through personal demons to become one of (the conservative) Time Magazine’s “heroes of the planet” for his environmental work.
But it is tiresome arguing here. It is more useful to spend time working politically against people who share your views. At least then a differnece can be made.
difference, oops.
All these complaints about how free speech was shut down by those protesting Coulter’s presentation — claiming that the US’s solution re free speech (The way to deal with speech you don’t like is to counter with more speech – not less) – makes no sense to me…
Isn’t yelling “Ann Go Home” or “Ann Get out of Canada” ALSO an expression of free speech? Why shouldn’t the protest people be allowed to excercise *their* free speech in such a fashion? Isn’t yelling and protesting somebody’s comments that you find objectionable EXACTLY what the Free Speech Warriors want to have happen instead of having people adjudicated before HRCs etc?
They want it both ways… They want the HRCs shut down — and they also want to ensure that people who express points of view that they don’t like (such as “Ann Coulter is a rotten evil bitch who should stay out of Canada if she doesn’t want to be yelled at for being a rotten evil bitch”) is also somehow verbotten.
Wish they would make up their mind.