Just Don't Call Me a Wife-Beater

Why is it that Tourette's cases like Ann Coulter can walk around shrieking "traitor!" at everyone to the left of Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet accusers of much less serious crimes face libel and defamation lawsuits? Eugene Volokh has the answer.

Comments

[fyodor]

master beater,

I wonder if Ms. Coulter would agree that she's using treason in a non-criminal sense!

Also, just because I'm anal retentive, you needn't have added your qualifiers to wife-beating as I don't think anyone would include those activities in wife-beating.

[Brendon]

That was an interesting legal beaver answer on Eugene's site. An even better blog is just under it and is on the Lawrence ruling. I want to know why Disney of all people allows a gay baccanal on their property?! And when will they have a straight one? I've had my eye on snow white...

[V]

Brendon,

You and a million others. I had a friend who worked at Disney and said that the number of times the women playing Snow White would get hit on was staggering (mostly middle aged men, but women also, not sure if this was during the gay bacchnal). He said one Snow White told him that on several occasions, she had dated fellow employees, only to find out that instead of wanting her, they had really wanted private sessions with her in costume. Escort services in Orlando take note, but have your lawyers ready.

If you'd like to enjoy a slightly more lascivious take on Snow White, try Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples."

[fyodor]

Brendon,

Juan seems to equate wanting to shield children from bawdiness with antipathy towards Gays. But if one were to avoid wet t-shirt contests for family vaction trips, it wouldn't necessarily say anything about one's views of Gays to avoid Gay baccanals as well. Still, I suppose that if social conservatives succeed in associating the behavior cited at Gay Day with all defense of Gays and their issues, there's likely a receptive audience in the mushy yet decisive American middle, and his conclusion may prove correct. Personally, Disney can host all the Gay baccanals they like for all I care. I'll get my own kicks on Route 66!

[ztv]

I don't know, liberals are the best friends the US government ever had...Ann's probably confusing the US government with some platonic ideal of the American way...

[Anonymous]

Oklahoma Man Gets Life in Prison for Spitting
OKLAHOMA CITY - An Oklahoma man arrested on suspicion of beating his wife faced year in prison and a fine. But when he spit in an arresting officer's face, he got a life sentence instead, officials said on Wednesday

[Lucas Wiman]

I doubt that any lawsuit could be made to stick to Coulter. She's a lawyer, and presumably understands the difference between insult and libel (or slander or whatever).

[Robert Speirs]

How could anyone who has read "Treason" call Ann Coulter a "Tourette's case"? It's the most calmly reasoned and fact-packed book she's ever written and far from hysterical. She makes a very good case that liberalism is a threat, not just to the US government, but to freedom itself, which is, or should be, or may be some day, the essence of the American way of life.

[Junis Chapell]

Our "mixed" economy and the resultant civil war of pressure groups fighting for "special" (collective) rights and privledges; which can only be financed at the expense of violating others "unalienable" rights is the ONLY major threat to freedom.

This system is supported, engorged and protected by BOTH libs and cons. American Political Ideology is irrelevant. They are both merely different ends of the same side of the coin.

Neither will deliver freedom - just different forms of statism and collectivism.

If it were ONLY the just liberals fault - at least there'd be a chance. But these people have us fighting not in support of freedom - as opposed to servitude, but in support of which style of servitude we most prefer.

[Anonymous]

Junis, you're a genius! (Seriously.)

[Mickey]

Mr."V" says, "If you'd like to enjoy a slightly more lascivious take on Snow White, try Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples."

Aren't you glad this is a Family Blog?

[whacker]

Nobody can beat their wife anymore, because wife-beating is now illegal. But wand-beating is still allowed.

[Mickey]

Like I said, aren't you glad this is a Family Blog?

[Kevin Carson]

V:

Hmmm.... Did they want her to bring along the glass coffin, too?

[Anonymous]

No, that's reserved for Sleeping Beauty.

[Boris A.Kupershmidt]

Why is it that every time I find
casual slanders flung out Ann Coulter's
way it invariably turns out that the
hisser is a boring envious mediocrity?

[Kevin Carson]

Shrieking? She doesn't shriek, she smirks. She issues a venomous pronouncement calculated to produce squeals of outrage, and then pauses to observe the effect with that "ain't I cute" smirk on her face. Considering the proportion of her neocon comrades who are Cold War Liberals, and still believe pretty much the same thing they did thirty or forty years ago under a different name, she's either stupid or disingenuous to turn the foreign policy debate into a "liberal" versus "conservative" thing. And whatever else you say about her, she's not stupid.

[Meschersheim]

Kupershmidt ... Kupershmidt. (Hmm.)
Isn't that German?

Any relation to Karloff?

[I Gotta Say I Have Read This E]

Yes, Matt Welch's characterization of Ann Coulter as a "Tourette's case" who walks around "shrieking" is wildly offbase. I'm not really a big fan of her -- and I think the whole "blond bombshell" description is a stretch -- but whenever I see her she's always engaged in calm, patient logic against interviewers who try desperately to bait her.

She says fiery stuff once in a while, but all in all she's struck me as scrupulously rational -- infatuated with logic almost to the point of being anal and pedantic. "Shrieking"? No way.

(But then, what's Matt Welch doing at Reason, anyway? Is he now a libertarian, or just a buddy of Tim Cavanaugh?)

[Rusty Lumbar]

Thank heaven for Ann Coulter. Now they can't cavalierly write me off as being part of, "just a bunch of Angry White Males" anymore.

[ahnold]

"To strive... to chance... to stare at the finish line far ahead... to take the first step... and in the effort, to have already won."

Gee, Toto, we're not in Austria anymore.

[Neil Block]

I concur with Volokh's conclusions, but that probably doesn't exclude civil suits brought upon accusers of "treason" for such charges as misappropriation of likeness. I could see someone called a "traitor" in Coulter's book using some sort of allegation like that to get back at her without having to rely on the strong burden of proof required for libel suits.

[Gene 6-Pack]

Treason includes advocating acts that are injurious to the United States and helpful to an enemy. Some may debate whether the USSR was an enemy of the United States, but I have had personal experience that validated that classification.

[master beater]

One can be a traitor or commit treason without violating the law. That which is treasonous, even towards one's country, can be applied to a large number of activities, only a small subset of which meet the legal definition. However, beating one's wife is always a violation of the law (in this country, at present, whether or not it is prosecuted), with the exception of situations of self-defense and the occasional, consentual S&M.

[Anonymous]

what was the point of the arnold link?

[Anonymous]

he is extreem right. he shoots people without mercy (it has been documented on film)

[Matt Welch]

Calmly reasoned, scrupulous rationalism of the day: "The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason." This is in the last sentence of Ann Coulter's new book, which is an attack on liberals entitled "Treason."

[Kevin Carson]

How about "USA Patriot doesn't take away any freedoms"?

All her appeals to visceral hatred of Hillary is just disingenuous. I hate Hillary, Barbra, Rosie &c as much as anyone alive, but you can't sell a statist agenda to me just by making pro forma attacks on them. Hell, Hillary voted FOR the Patriot Act, as did Chuck Schumer.

Coulter is a statist, an apologist for a permanent warfare state and domestic police state that should be an abomination to real libertarians. But she packages her statism with anti-big government rhetoric and appeals to the hot button symbolism of justifiable populist hatred toward Hillary. It's all done cyncially, to produce effect.

Why is it that every time somebody is identified as a libertarian hawk, you can count on them regurgitating agitprop from Horowitz, Coulter, and their ilk? I think the neolibertarians and warbloggers have been assimilated into the borg--but as Jim Henley asked, what have they gotten from Bush as compensation for selling out on the neocon foreign policy agenda? Have Ashcroft & Ridge compromised even an iota in the direction of civil liberty? Has Horowitz or Coulter measurably toned down support for the police state as a reward for the libertarian sellout? Nope--they fanatically defend every jackbooted measure of Ass-crap, and squeal for the hides of every "traitor" who questions them.

As St. Thomas More said, it profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world--but WALES??!

I eagerly await the (mostly anonymous) bon mots about anti-semitism, conspiracy and tin foil hats that inevitably follow any reference to neocons.

[Neolibertarian Warblogger]

Did you know that supporting the war made you a neocon, so you now have to agree with every item of their evil agenda? I didn't. Well now I know. I didn't know I was supposted quote Horowit and Coulter either. I will try to do so in the future.

I also feel sort of ripped off, because neither Bush, Ridge, Aschcroft, David Horowitz or Coulter never called me personally to ask for my support of the war. That way I could tell them I supported the war and in return I wanted protection of civil liberties....

YOU ARR RIGHT! I WAS RIPPED OFF! AND SO WERE ALL YOU "LIBERTARIAN" SELL-OUTS! I expect your official libertarian badge on my desk by the morning. You are expelled from the Movement you right-opportunist traitors! Now never speak in support of libertarian ideas again.

[Kevin Carson]

You've obviously taken the red pill, Neo.

[extreme videos production of r]

Sic volo, sic iubeo - I want this, I order this. (Juvenalis)

[StoweBerns Lindsey]

EMAIL: [e-mail]
IP: 62.213.67.122
URL: http://free-digital-photo.online-photo-print.com
DATE: 01/20/2004 08:26:33
Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.