Treason
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29 January 2022
Because Ann Coulter has always been so pro-Republican regardless of what the party is doing at that moment I haven't really paid that much attention to her over the years. Thus, when I picked up Treason from my dad's bookshelf to read I was surprised to find a very well-researched polemic. Coulter deploys her biting wit to pillory Democrats from the Cold War until the start of the War on Terror. Her predictions for how quickly Bush would rap things up ring a bit hollow after American troops spent two decades in Afghanistan and then handed it back to the same Taliban it was taken from. Her narration on Soviet espionage in the US government, however one-sided it is, nevertheless provided a fascinating account including the then newly declassified information from the Venona Project. Her attacks on the duplicity of Democrats ring true but, of course, she also leaves out anything Republicans might have screwed up. Thus, as a criticism of half of the American political duopoly Coulter's book is spectacular, although it's not too hard to find some of the same character flaws in politicians across the aisle if one looks. Coulter does not. Still, the exercise of looking at history through a particular polemic lens is often clarifying for ideas. I will surely be on the lookout for her next book to see if she has remained as sharp in the written word twenty years on.
