As a gesture of open-mindedness and a sign of how much I love and respect some conservatives I was interacting with online, I offered to read Ann Coulter's Treason.
I tried, really I did. No, I didn't finish. I read some of each chapter, I flipped around trying to pick up threads of meaning, I scanned the index and read anything related to topics I knew or found interesting, I read her conclusion chapter. The phrase 'rhetorical storm' comes to mind, though that implies something a good deal more orderly than what is found here. Most of the statements are at a tangent to, or utterly incidental to, any facts she happens to cite. Even if every fact cited is correct, I can't think of her as an honest writer. Everything is... spun just so.
Coulter writes to give the ignorant and belligerent a sense of justification. This isn't a work meant to persuade anybody, it's intended to draw in people already sympathetic to her view and take them on an emotional fairground ride pointing out who they should love and who they should hate. Sweeping a variety of liberal, Democrat, (no those two are not the same and only coincidentally overlap) and perhaps even a handful of actual socialist and other statements together, she paints a picture of a monolithic force of evil that True Patriotic Conservatives Like Her and You can define their goodness by their opposition.
I count it as self-evident that you can't assume you're so obviously the good guy that all of your acts can be simply justified by that foundation. Coulter does not agree here, "Republicans proceed from the assumption of America's virtue. Democrats do not." This is apparently proof of Republicans' moral superiority in her version of the universe, never mind the fact that I know several Republican voters and self-described conservatives for whom it's not true. There's the "patriotism" (really nationalism, per Orwell) which says "we are absolutely the greatest," and there's the patriotism which says "we should and can be better." Coulter puts herself firmly in the former, and considers you an America-hater if you fall into the latter.
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