Video: Ann Coulter will CAMPAIGN for Hillary if McCain is nominated

[fossten]

Video from Hannity/Colmes

GOP TO EDWARDS: HOW MUCH FOR THAT CONCESSION SPEECH?
by Ann Coulter
January 30, 2008

The Democrats are trying to give away an election they should win in a walk by nominating someone with real problems -- like, for example, a first-term senator with a 100 percent rating from Americans for Democratic Action and whose middle name is "Hussein."

But we won't let them.

The bright side of the Florida debacle is that I no longer fear Hillary Clinton. (I mean in terms of her becoming president -- on a personal level, she's still a little creepy.) I'd rather deal with President Hillary than with President McCain. With Hillary, we'll get the same ruinous liberal policies with none of the responsibility. [Rush said the same thing]
Also, McCain lies a lot, which is really more a specialty of the Democrats.

Recently, McCain responded to Mitt Romney's statement that he understood the economy based on his many years in the private sector by claiming Romney had said a military career is not a "real job."

McCain's neurotic boast that he is the only Republican who supported the surge is beginning to sound as insane as Bill Clinton's claim to being the "first black president" -- although less insulting to blacks. As with the Clintons, you find yourself looking up such tedious facts as this, which ran a week after Bush announced the surge:

"On the morning of Bush's address, Romney endorsed a troop surge." -- The National Journal, Jan. 13, 2007

And yet for the 4 billionth time, at the Jan. 5, 2008, Republican debate, McCain bragged about his own raw courage in supporting the surge despite (apocryphal) Republican attacks, saying: "I said at the time that Gen. Petraeus and his strategy must be employed, and I was criticized by Republicans at that time. And that was a low point, but I stuck to it. I didn't change."

A review of contemporaneous news stories about the surge clearly demonstrates that the only Republicans who were so much as "skeptical" of the surge consisted of a few oddball liberal Republicans such as Sens. Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman and Olympia Snowe.

They certainly weren't attacking McCain, their standard-bearer in liberal Republicanism. But even if they were, it was a "low point" for McCain being "criticized" by the likes of Olympia Snowe?

In point of fact, McCain didn't even stand up to the milquetoasts. In April 2007, when Democrats in the Senate passed a bill funding the troops but also requiring a rapid withdrawal, "moderate" Republicans Smith and Chuck Hagel voted with the Democrats. McCain and Lindsey Graham skipped the vote.

But like the Democrats, McCain thinks if he simply says something over and over again, he can make people believe it's true. Thus again at the South Carolina debate on Jan. 10, McCain was proclaiming that he was "the only one on this stage" who supported the surge.

Since he would deny it about two minutes later, here is exactly what Mr. Straight Talk said about the surge: "I supported that; I argued for it. I'm the only one on this stage that did. And I condemn the Rumsfeld strategy before that."

The next question went to Giuliani and -- amid great flattery -- Giuliani noted that he also supported Bush's surge "the night of the president's speech."

Mr. Straight Talk contradicted Giuliani, saying: "Not at the time."

Again, Giuliani said: "The night of the president's speech, I was on television. I supported the surge. I've supported it throughout."

To which McCain finally said he didn't mean that he was "the only one on this stage" who supported the surge. So by "the only one on this stage," McCain really meant, "one of several people on this stage." OK, great. Now tell us your definition of the word "is," Senator.

I know Republicans have been trained not to go prostrate at Ivy League degrees, but do we have to admire stupidity?

Mr. Straight Talk also announced at that same debate: "One of the reasons why I won in New Hampshire is because I went there and told them the truth." That and the fact that Democrats were allowed to vote in the Republican primary.

Even in the Florida primary, allegedly limited to Republicans, McCain lost among Republicans. (Seventeen percent of the Republican primary voters in Florida called themselves "Independents.")

That helps, but why would any Republican vote for McCain?

At least under President Hillary, Republicans in Congress would know that they're supposed to fight back. When President McCain proposes the same ideas -- tax hikes, liberal judges and Social Security for illegals -- Republicans in Congress will support "our" president -- just as they supported, if only briefly, Bush's great ideas on amnesty and Harriet Miers.

You need little flags like that for Republicans since, as we know from the recent unpleasantness in Florida, Republicans are unalterably stupid.

Republicans who vote for McCain are trying to be cute, like the Democrats were four years ago by voting for the "pragmatic" candidate, Vietnam vet John Kerry. This will turn out to be precisely as clever a gambit as nominating Kerry was, the brilliance of which was revealed on Election Day 2004.

COPYRIGHT 2008 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
4520 Main Street, Kansas City, MO 64111

 

[Calabrio]

Hopefully everyone who's going to support Huckabee or Paul will reconsider their primary vote to prevent that from happening.

 

[04SCTLS]

Conservatives Against McCain
James Joyner | Friday, February 1, 2008

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/

Judging by the enemies he’s making, I’m liking John McCain more with each passing day.

Ann Coulter says she’d “campaign for” Hillary Clinton, who she thinks “is more conservative.”

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck is railing against “Juan McCain” for his outreach to Hispanics.

Thankfully, this over-the-top stuff is being rejected by most conservatives.

AllahPundit calls Coulter’s statement “Madness” and Sean Hackbarth, late of the Fred Thompson campaign, says she is “officially an idiot.”

RedState’s Leon H Wolf warns commenters that they may “complain vociferously about McCain, Bush, or anyone else’s position on immigration” but they will be banned from the site if they do so in racist terms.

Even Jonah Goldberg, hardly the voice of rational discourse while hawking a book about how American liberals are Fascists, thinks “the notion that, variously, conservatism, the country or the party are doomed if he’s the nominee or the president is pretty absurd.”

Moreover, he makes an interesting point:

I think both the GOP and the conservative movement could benefit from a slightly more adversarial relationship. George W. Bush moved the party leftward and/or damaged the image of the GOP in many respects precisely because he was given the benefit of the doubt by conservatives who saw him as “one of us.” It’s not obvious to me that having a more transactional relationship with a Republican president would be altogether bad for the country, the party or the conservative movement.

As I’ve noted many times before, the mainstream of both major American parties would fit comfortably within the British Conservative Party. Indeed, within its right wing. So, the choice between Hillary Clinton and John McCain, if it comes to that, isn’t one between extremes. Contra Victor David Hanson, the “gulf” between them is hardly “Grand-Canyon like.”

That’s not to say, however, that the election is unimportant or that there are not significant differences. Clinton isn’t Barack Obama, the most liberal senator in a recent National Journal survey, but she is #16. The full chart apparently is available only to subscribers, so I can’t find a comparable score for McCain. We do know, however, that his lifetime conservative rating using the same index is 71.8. This compares favorably with Tom Tancredo, a darling of the Borders Are Our Only Issue conservatives, who rates 75.9.

Additionally, from a conservative perspective, there’s another advantage to voting for McCain: You know that he actually agrees with you on the issues where he says he agrees with you. Whether he’s 71.8 percent conservative or 82.6 (American Conservative Union), it’s hard to accuse him of pandering. With Clinton, conversely, one can be excused for wondering if she’s just positioning herself for maximum political benefit.

UPDATE (Alex Knapp): Regarding the National Journal survey naming Obama “the most liberal Democrat”, Steve Benen has an excellent post explaining exactly why this is a ridiculous finding (since I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that Obama is more liberal than, say, Russ Feingold):


What’s more, Obama was the 16th most liberal senator in 2005, and the 10th most liberal in 2006, before racing to the front of the pack in 2007. National Journal suggests this has something to do with Obama moving to the left to curry favor with Democratic primary voters.

But there’s a more logical explanation: Obama missed a whole lot of votes in 2007 — he’s been on the campaign trail — but was on the floor for many of the biggest, most consequential votes. In nearly every instance, he voted with the party. And with that, voila! The most liberal senator in America.

Except that’s not much of a standard. The rankings use an amorphous meaning of the word “liberal,” and the percentage doesn’t take missed votes into account at all (which also helps explain why Kerry nabbed the top spot four years ago)

Brian Beutler further elaborates:


Yes, passion is hard to gauge. But instead of trying (by, say, logging hours spent speaking at hearings, from the chamber, etc., and assigning those a value to be paired with voting records) National Journal relies instead on a weird system by which a senator who takes the “liberal” position 95 times out of 100 is somehow less liberal than his colleague who takes the liberal position 48 times out of 50.

Most of these types of “voting guides” are dubious, and tend to say more about the groups promoting them than they do about the politicians they are ostensibly describing.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Fair point on the various rating scales. There are all manner of problems — What counts as “conservative” vice “liberal”? What to do with missed votes? — but they have the advantage of being independent measures. National Journal or ACU or whathaveyou have a system in place and it serves as a means of comparison. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s preferable than basing one’s view on two or three controversial votes, which is what campaigns seem to focus on.

UPDATE II (James Joyner): Sociologist Kieran Healy endorses Lewis and Poole’s Optimal Classification ranking as a better alternative. By this measure, Obama is merely the 21st most liberal senator and Clinton is 25th. McCain is 94th.

 

[04SCTLS]

Has Ann Coulter Finally Jumped The Shark?

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

She did for me last year at CPAC, of course, when she derided John Edwards as a ":q:q:qgot". At the time, a number of conservative bloggers wrote that she had embarrassed the movement and owed Edwards an apology, which she refused to offer. This year, the ACU has opted not to have her as a featured speaker, although I understand she will appear at an ancillary event at CPAC.

Of course, she can then explain why she will campaign for Hillary Clinton if John McCain wins the Republican nomination:



So let's walk through the logic here. John McCain gets castigated by Coulter because he aligns himself too often with the Democrats. Her solution to that is --- to campaign for the Democrats? Maybe someone can explain the thought process to me, but it sounds like a hysterical demand for extortion rather than a considered and thoughtful political position.

I'm supporting Mitt Romney because I think he is the better option. If Mitt doesn't win the nomination, I plan to support John McCain. He will have won the support of more of the party, and that would make him the man to carry the banner. I will still oppose some of his policy stands and acknowledge his apparent animus at times to the party base, but he will still be a much better choice for the nation than Hillary Clinton.

It appears Coulter hates McCain more than she cares about conservative values. She has acquired McCain Derangement Syndrome, and is rather obviously unbalanced by it. Sean Hannity was clearly embarrassed to listen to this tirade, and Coulter should have been embarrassed to have indulged in it.

UPDATE: Thanks to Real Clear Politics for the link.

Some in the comments argue that Coulter didn't actually call Edwards a :q:q:qgot. Here's the quote: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘:q:q:qgot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” It's complete intellectual dishonesty to claim that this isn't the same thing as publicly calling him that name. Any argument otherwise is a fraud. Don't even pull that weak trash out here.

Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 1, 2008

 

[Calabrio]

At the time, a number of conservative bloggers wrote that she had embarrassed the movement and owed Edwards an apology, which she refused to offer.

Those are the same Republicans who were embarrassed by her long before she made the joke, and also tend to be the establishment, belt-way social climbers that are endorsing McCain.

 

[04SCTLS]

The McCain Disconnects
Matt Welch of Reason notices a strange phenomenon in primary voting this year, one that seems highly counterintuitive. I had noticed this in New Hampshire as well, and the trend has continued. John McCain, despite his championing of the Iraq war, continues to draw pluralities in self-professed anti-war voters:

It's no mystery why independents gravitate toward McCain. He's a country-first, party-second kind of guy who speaks bluntly and delights in poking fellow Republicans in the eye on issues such as campaign finance reform and global warming.
But there's a bizarre disconnect in the warm embrace between McCain and the electorate's mavericks. They hate the Iraq war, while he's willing to fight it for another century. The most pro-war presidential candidate in a decade is winning the 2008 GOP nomination thanks to the antiwar vote.

A full 66% of independents think that the U.S. should completely withdraw from Iraq no later than 12 months from now, according to a Jan. 18-22 L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll. McCain, meanwhile, said last month that the U.S. might stay in Baghdad for another 100 years. He continually expresses bafflement at the idea that that might not be such a good thing. "It's not the point! It's not the point!" he snarled at reporters recently. "How long are we going to be in Korea?"

And yet he dominated the antiwar vote in New Hampshire, with 44% to Romney's 19%, according to CNN exit polls. Ron Paul, the only actual antiwar Republican running, drew just 16% of voters who said they were against the war. The three finished in the same order among antiwar voters in Michigan, even though Romney won the state overall.


Welch, who backed anti-war candidate Ron Paul until recently (see update II below), laments the fact that anti-war voters ignored Paul. Plenty of reasons exist for voters to ignore Paul outside of the war, but it still calls into question the choice of McCain among these voters. Do they not understand his singular focus on fighting the war, or are they voting for McCain simply because he has told off Republicans more than he has Democrats?

In that vein, Mark Tapscott looks at a story from last March, regarding Tom Daschle's claim that McCain wanted to negotiate a switch to the Democrats:

To put McCain in proper perspective, imagine if the mainstream media had been touting former Sen. Zell Miller as the Maverick to lead the Democratic party in 2004 because he demonstrated his independence by helping Bush and the GOP enact tax cuts, pass school vouchers and pack the Supreme Court with clones of Justice Clarence Thomas.
McCain has denied the story in The Hill, while John Edwards -- who Daschle claims was part of the effort -- confirms it. Both Daschle and Edwards have other motives in play, and it remains questionable whether the Democratic Party of 2001 would have welcomed a pro-life hawk when they could barely tolerate a liberal hawk like Joe Lieberman just a few years later. One has to wonder how McCain would have gotten re-elected in Arizona as a Democrat as well. (see update below)

However, McCain likes to antagonize his fellow Republicans a lot more than the Democrats, and Republicans have noticed it over the years. So have independents, and this appears to account for the strange anti-war attraction to McCain, the GOP's biggest hawk in the race. For them, the war looks like a secondary issue to general opposition to the GOP and the Bush administration. McCain improbably has become the outsider candidate, and Romney the establishment candidate as a result.

After New Hampshire, Romney decided to go after the "Washington is Broken" theme hard. He seems to have realized the importance of being the outsider, while McCain has oddly doubled down on the war, as Welch notes. During the last debate, McCain kept arguing that Romney didn't sufficiently support the war by not jumping immediately to the defense of the surge, but his singular focus on the war may wind up hurting him with the same people who have vaulted him into the position of being able to run it himself.

That will only work if the disconnects stay disconnected, which seems to be a very risky gamble for the general election. Will the anti-war factions who back McCain in the primary stick with him against Hillary Clinton or especially Barack Obama, or will the Democratic nominee give that faction an even better opportunity to stick their own finger in the eye of the GOP?

UPDATE: I forgot that I addressed this when it came out. I leaned towards it being nonsense then, and I still do.

UPDATE II: Matt Welch corrects me, in the comments; he never pledged his support to the Paul campaign. I hope he accepts my apology.

Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 1, 2008

 

[fossten]

Just for the record, Mr. Cut and Paste, I'm a member of Hotair and I can tell you that Allahpundit is a nutcase himself. He's not only an atheist, but hates Christians and bashes them regularly in his posts. And he's one of the worst name callers in the blogosphere. I have very little respect for him.

 

[shagdrum]

I always find it interesting that all Coulter's critics can't attack her on substance. It is always personal attacks; she is a bitch, evil, an idiot (though she has a law degree), etc. None of which has anything to do with her credibility, and is usually just inacurate distortion. None of her opponents can argue substance against her. Just attempt to distort and dishonestly discredity through irrelevant claims.



It is interesting to note that no one who has called her an idiot can back that statement up with an in context example showing some absurd leap in logic given the facts she cites. In fact, she is one of the wisest pundits out there today, IMO, and one of the most colorful. This is why she is so hated, because she is accurate and colorful. The hatred for her is proof that the truth hurts.

 

[fossten]

I always find it interesting that all Coulter's critics can't attack her on substance. It is always personal attacks; she is a bitch, evil, an idiot (though she has a law degree), etc. None of which has anything to do with her credibility, and is usually just inacurate distortion. None of her opponents can argue substance against her. Just attempt to distort and dishonestly discredity through irrelevant claims.



It is interesting to note that no one who has called her an idiot can back that statement up with an in context example showing some absurd leap in logic given the facts she cites. In fact, she is one of the wisest pundits out there today, IMO, and one of the most colorful. This is why she is so hated, because she is accurate and colorful. The hatred for her is proof that the truth hurts.

BINGO! And I'll add that they've never read one of her books, any of which are treatises of intellectual feasting.

 

[shagdrum]

BINGO! And I'll add that they've never read one of her books, any of which are treatises of intellectual feasting.

Damn straight!

 

[ford nut]

I would vote for Satan before I would vote for Hillary Clinton, I am truly convinced Ann Coulter has gone off the deep end of the pool.
Maybe because Hillary is a woman has helped her take the plunge.

 

[fossten]

I would vote for Satan before I would vote for Hillary Clinton, I am truly convinced Ann Coulter has gone off the deep end of the pool.
Maybe because Hillary is a woman has helped her take the plunge.

[sound of annoying buzzer going off]

There is zero evidence that she is doing this because of Hillary's female physical characteristics. Besides, how do you really know Hillary's a woman? :shifty:

 

[04SCTLS]

Ann Coulter will be on Larry King Live on thursday feb 7th