Rating: 
Summary: Obnoxious, if slightly amusing
Review: I find it always quite entertaining while listening to or reading some ultra, on the edge of fanatism, conservative (as in this case) or liberal. It's almost funny but reading this book and trying to follow the logic of the author, her many quotes from various sources, creates a totally opposite effect from the one the author desires. Just in this particular sense the book is a failure - it failes to convey the message. Besides, it's full of hatred and very obnoxious. Al Franken called this book a political pornography and I totally agree. The book contains a few interesting points and arguments but the way Ann Coulter writes about it kills any potential interest in these points and arguments (in the end people don't watch pornography to find some interesting ideas).
Rating: 
Summary: Preaching to the fundamentalist choir
Review: I firmly believe that she has made a very compelling case that Republican Presidents tend to act with honor and with America's best interest at heart when it comes to fighting tyranny and terror and that Democratic Presidents tend to act without honor and without America's best interest at heart when it comes to fighting tyranny and terror, thus the apt title of this book "Treason".Come on. To assume that to disagree with the Republican party line is treason is not only simplistic it is insulting. As I recall FDR was a Democrat and took opposing someone fairly out there on the tyranny scale rather seriously. Factcheck.org has a good analysis of both Coulter and her detractors. But, I'm sure the converted will pass non-partisan analysis off as liberal media spin. It is amazingly convenient, if someone doesn't agree with you, they are a liberal hack who probably had a hand in Vince Foster's death and everything else that is Clinton's fault.(..)
Rating:
Summary: Obnoxious but sometimes thought-provoking
Review: 2.5 stars. I didn't expect to find anything of value in this book. We're all familiar with Coulter's deliberately provocative style (a tedious mix of hyperbole, sweeping generalization and hypocrisy). Her approach isn't nuanced enough to be called satire. Al Franken had it right when he called her a political pornographer, catering to her audience's basest instincts. Nevertheless, some of her underlying arguments appear well-supported. She makes some interesting points about the relative merits of diplomacy and military intervention, and she's obviously correct in stating that some liberals reflexively oppose everything that a Republican president does. (Of course, there are plenty of dogmatic conservatives as well- note some of the five-star reviews for this divisive, nasty book...) Her bias is always obvious and she often cherry-picks facts to support her position, but I sometimes had difficulty refuting her arguments. The bottom line is that this book helped me pinpoint some gaps in my knowledge and some possible flaws in my reasoning. "Treason" is a reminder of the importance of an informed opinion. All readers of this book, knee-jerk liberals and knee-jerk conservatives alike, should use it as a catalyst for re-examining their own biases and seeking out multiple points of view.
Rating:
Summary: Blame it on the Liberals
Review: Even with hindsight some conservatives can't see straight. Another long winded harangue from the pin-up girl of the Right Wing, this time doing a bit of revisionist history to blame liberals for every ill conceivable from Truman to Clinton. There isn't much in this book that hasn't already been said 100 times over by other conservative pundits. Everyone knows the failure of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to deal with the Vietnam War, and McNamara has been more than forthcoming in his role in escalating the war, but Coulter seems to forget that this was a war that stemmed back to the Eisenhower administration, which supported the French in Indochina before lending assistance to a "third force" in Vietnam that would supposedly better connect with the people. No one administration stood out in this war that stretched from the mid-50's to 1975, including Cambodia. It was a disgraceful episode in American history that drug on despite Nixon's "secret plan" to bring it to an end. A plan whose only purpose it seemed was to secure him a second term. I don't expect someone like Coulter to examine these issues in any depth. She uses them more as a sounding board for her vitriolic chatter. But, she has found an ear among conservatives who are looking to bury "liberalism" once and for all.
Rating: 
Summary: Many Important Facts
Review: Although the book is stylistically written in a way to tick off left wing extremists, many of the points made in the book are extremely sensible and important. If it wasn't for writers like Coulter, the fact that JFK and RFK had Martin Luther King wiretapped to smear him, that Truman's coverup resulted in McCarthyism, and that Robert McNamara holds most of the responsibility for the Vietnam War would be totally erased by partisan historians. People also tend to forget that most of the civil rights legislation, the EPA, Affirmative Action, and Great Society reforms that worked were developed by the Nixon Administration. When Reagan cut social programs in the 1980s, they were Nixon's, not Johnson's or Kennedy's. It is disturbing that opponents of Coulter treat "Treason" as a Partisan attack rather than a reminder of important historical facts that academia tries to erase from the record. Please, read the book with an open mind and don't be so narrow minded that you overlook the importance of "Treason."
Rating:
Summary: Read it then vote...
Review: Before you write off this book as merely being something only the right wing red neck reader will enjoy as Ann Coulter preaches to the choir, before you decide my five star rating automatically deserves an "unhelpful" vote as far as reviews go, think for a minute, or even a second, what if she's right? What if she's right even about a small portion of what she declares as being true in this book on the treasonous behavior of the left? Would it perhaps rate your attention for more than a sneer or a quick retort about how she's just a right wing demagogue? Ann Coulter has chronicled the behavior of liberals and their Democratic party and its presidents that have not only acted treasonously against the United States, but have dismissed millions, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions to death, torture, "reeducation" camps and misery. That millions have been butchered due to policies put in place and advocated by the Democratic party would seem to be an outrageous statement unworthy of further review if advanced by someone that wasn't such a brilliant writer and thinker and so well documented. The reason that Ann Coulter is so violently hated by the left is simply because her brilliance and logic cannot simply be set aside, those that fail to read the truthfulness of her words do so at their own peril. Her words remind us of how dangerous a world we live in and how dangerous it was once under the ominous threat of the Soviet Union. Reagan's policies and actions lead directly to the down fall of the Soviets (she provides enough documentation here that coupled with common sense and anything other than a blind hatred for Reagan will convince the reader of what a true hero he really is). The current war on terror can be won too, if we as a nation will only allow ourselves to be reminded of the past, and not embark on the course of the Democratic Party which, since World War II has fought, seemingly, on the side of America's enemies. Or not so "seemingly" as the case my be, some leftists don't even pretend to root for America as she again documents with clarity. Ann Coulter does a wonderful job of reminding the reader of the past and paralleling it with current events. This is perhaps the best strength of this work. She makes comparisons that allows the reader to see how disloyal and vile the actions of Democratic party were in the past, how through their collective power of the vote here in America so many lives in other parts of the world were systematically destroyed and at the same time our national defense was diminished. Today we face similar threats and she reminds us, shows us, over and over again, how the liberals in America fight to destroy what most Americas hold dear. The history lesson on Joseph McCarthy was especially enlightening. Several times she writes "most of you will be reading/hearing about this person/event for the first time." She explains how the left was so successful at demonizing a man that later, long after he was dead, long after liberals had convinced us all how evil he was, he was finally proven to be totally correct. Secret cables from the Soviet Union were finally declassified in 1995. The left was totally wrong and evil in it's behavior, Ann Coulter points out, but enough of the myth had been spoken over and over that by the time the real truth came it, it was a little too late for most people to understand what really had happened. The war on terrorism will be won or lost depending on how the politicians in America decide to fight it is one of the points I take away from my reading of Ann Coulter's book. Will they act honorably or treasonous? I firmly believe that she has made a very compelling case that Republican Presidents tend to act with honor and with America's best interest at heart when it comes to fighting tyranny and terror and that Democratic Presidents tend to act without honor and without America's best interest at heart when it comes to fighting tyranny and terror, thus the apt title of this book "Treason". I give it one of my strongest recommendations and further claim that not reading it before voting is simply to put your head in the sand.
Rating:
Summary: Not pseudohistory, but as close as you can get to it
Review: When writing an Op/Ed column, one does not really have to be concerned with having one's facts straight, since of course the column usually concern's one's personal assessment of current events. For example, if Ann Coulter wants to call moderate Republicans like Arlen Spector & Michael Bloomberg Democrats only pretending to be Republicans --- well, who can argue with her opinion on that? There are no specific facts that will prove or disprove that statement; agree or disagree with her, Ann Coulter is clearly in her element when it comes to opining. However, with "Treason," she has ventured into the perilous territory of writing history (and whether she likes it or not, that is exactly what she is doing), and history is an academic discipline which adheres to certain standards of scholarship. Those who fail adhere to those standards (such as Afrocentrists & Holocaust deniers) are often known as pseudohistorians, who are presenting a deliberately distorted picture of history in order to further a specific ideological agenda. Ann Coulter may not be on the same order as David Irving, but there are times she comes pretty damned close. Sean Hannity did the same thing in "Deliver Us From Evil," when he presented a laughably outdated assessment of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy, an assessment so easily disproven by the historical record that Hannity came across as a bumbling amateur. Coulter, no doubt as a result of her legal training, is much more canny. Her facts, in and of themselves, are meticulously researched and would be difficult to disprove. But does this mean that she paints an accurate picture of history? A fair synopsis of the Coulter argument would be: 1) There were communist spies well-placed in the US government, proven by the now-declassified Venona cables. Liberals denied that there was a high level of communist espionage taking place. 2) Senator McCarthy pursued communists in the State Department & the US Army, and for his efforts was destroyed by the liberals. 3) Liberals and Democrats, having been accessories to massive communist infiltration and having destroyed the most prominent anti-communist whistle-blower, then embarked on a path of aiding and abetting the enemies of the US down to the present day. Coulter is able to extrapolate almost all of this based on the fact that the Venona Cables prove what was long suspected --- that there were in fact communist operatives in place in the US government in the mid-1940's. Coulter and her defenders would argue that the Venona Cables vindicate everything that McCarthy did; in fact they do no such thing. The spies dealt with in the Venona Cables had either been arrested or had fled the country long before McCarthy began his activities. Nearly a full decade separates the Venona Cables and McCarthy at the height of his activities --- to presume to connect one with the other without hard evidence requires a leap of faith and a lot of assumptions. Responsible historians do not engage in leaps of faith. If there were communists in the government during McCarthy's time (we don't know, since McCarthy failed to unmask a single one), they were different operatives entirely from the ones dealt with in the Venona Cables. The most damning thing about the Venona Cables is that it shows that liberals greatly underestimated the extent of communist espionage within the US government, and that hardly constitutes treason. Coulter's argument also ignores the fact that it wasn't the liberals that failed to catch the various communists that got away, it usually was the FBI, led by the arch-anticommunist J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover & the FBI were well aware of the spies mentioned in the Venona Cables for years, but let several get away scot-free. How exactly did the liberals cause this? Hoover also gave great support to McCarthy, despite the concerns of legitimate anti-espionage experts who believed that McCarthy, with his showboating and grandiose accusations, was deflecting attention from genuine communist operatives. Recent scholarship has shown that McCarthy (with Hoover's support), not the liberals, probably did more long-term damage to the anti-espionage community than anyone else, by discrediting the anticommunist crusade. Coulter also ignores the fact that McCarthy was censured by a GOP-led Congress, and that a great number of Republicans (including Eisenhower) either distrusted or outright opposed McCarthy. A great number of Republicans rode McCarthy's coattails because it was politically expedient --- when he overreached himself by taking on the US Army, these same Republicans took advantage of the opportunity to rid themselves of an increasingly embarrassing liability. The Democrats never could have stopped McCarthy on their own, but you wouldn't know this from reading Coulter's book. The rest of Coulter's book is your typical partisan cherry-picking, which should come as no surprise. Democratic administrations are universally condemned for bungling the Cold War, while the Republican administrations inevitably triumph. Obviously a double standard is at work here. If Nixon had been a Democrat, Coulter would have excoriated him for pulling out of Viet Nam, establishing relations with Red China, and cutting spending of defense. Similarly, if Eisenhower & JFK had been of different parties, Coulter would have assigned the blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco to Ike, since it was his administration that drew up the plan in the first place. Of course, Reagan gets credit for ending the Cold War, even though the defense spending that brought the Soviets to their knees was merely a continuation of Carter's aggresive spending increases on defense. Neither Carter nor Truman (who of course embarked on the policy of containment in the first place) receive anything other than ridicule and scorn. The Bush, Clinton, and Bush years are not even worth discussing, as Coulter does not even attempt to maintain the guise of objectivity. One would hope that most people will appreciate that the historical record does not conform to Coulter's black-and-white view of the world. I can only assume that with Republicans in control of both the White House & the Congress, Coulter has been forced to reach into the past to assault liberals and Democrats. A Kerry victory in November would be a dream come true for Coulter, for it would mean that she could abandon the writing of history and go back to writing polemics against a Democratic president --- which really is her bread & butter anyway. She would do well to leave the writing of history to those scholars who actually have some respect for the discipline.
Rating:
Summary: Ann Coulter Exposed
Review: I can no longer remain silent on what I know beyond a moral certainty about Ann Coulter. It is time that the American people know the truth: Ann Coulter is an agent working for the liberals as part of a vast diabolical plot to undermine the validity of most core conservative positions and to turn the whole of conservatism in this country into a laughing stock. Coulter represents liberal treachery in its most cancerous and insidious form. Unable to enter into an honest, evenly matched challenge of conservative principles so that they can be laid out before thinking and principled Americans to decide, liberals like Coulter have attempted to sabotage the process by writing a "conservative" set of essays so spectacularly burlesque of reasoned conservative views, so outrageous and over-the-top that the reading public will reflexively dismiss conservatives everywhere as paranoid lunatics. In their own dark twisted plot, these liberals have apparently hoped that through Coulter's "Treason," they could do to the Republican Party what "Spinal Tap" did to heavy metal music. Herein then lies but the most recent lurid example for the magnitude and depth of nefarious mendacity liberals are willing to go to lay siege on democracy. To effectively counter this evil liberal insurgency, it is necessary to understand the cunning artfulness of their unctuous trade. Leaving no detail to chance, Coulter and her liberal masters have crafted a book of such shrill and vituperative stridency that the prose literally leaps off the page like spittle hitting you in the face if you were to stand too close to an irrate neo-Nazi at a Klan rally. Coulter shows herself to be a true artisan of ingenious nuance. The "liberal" that Coulter refers to is deliberately kept broad and absurdly general as to include virtually anyone who still favors a two or more party system of government. At various turns liberals are "the Democrats," the academic "elite," the media, civil libertarians, virtually anyone who defied McCarthy or Nixon. The unwitting reader, lured into Coulter's web that beckons with a sense of urgency issues of fundamental concern, is then ambushed by a relentless onslaught of banalities and side-splitting absurdities which make the liberal bogeyman into everyone so that the liberal is effectively rendered into no one. All this is done without once revealing her true liberal agenda that would belie itself in the less skilled hands of a satirist or mere pundit. The crown jewel of this screed is the case for Joe McCarthy. As Coulter is willing to admit, there was considerable communist activity in 40's-50's America: some of it of the romantic ideological variety espoused by rather uninformed dilettantes largely from academic and art quarters while others were true subversives and communist agents actively infiltrating and spying within the U. S. Government. Coulter's scheme here is to depict McCarthy as a martyr who was maligned as part of a liberal plot to neutralize the exposure of true communists. But Coulter's hidden leftist machinations here do not hold up in the light of more rigorous scrutiny. Given the real threat that communism and Soviet espionage posed during the Cold War period, why was such an awesome responsibility of determining the truth, of separating real threats from uninformed sympathies, placed in the hands of a drunken buffoon like Joe McCarthy who turned the entire inquiry into an idiotic witch hunt? I'll tell you why. I'm afraid that I must now share what I understand beyond a moral certainty: Joe McCarthy was a communist agent planted in an elaborate plot to obscure the real threat of communist espionage and sabotage under a carnival cloud of absurdity and extremes. When the inquiries were effectively halted with Welch's famous charge to McCarthy, "have you no sense of decency," little did Welch realize how perfectly he was playing into the diabolical hands of Joe McCarthy and his clandestine communist plot to innoculate the American people from a real concern by amplifying it to a ridiculous level of absurdity. I will reveal more latter...
Rating:
Summary: Fair and Balanced Review
Review: People should indeed read this book. Note that I said READ this book. I did not say anything about buying the book and wasting your money. Take it out of your public library, or perhaps borrow it from a gullible friend. I spent much of the last month reading both sides of what appears much like a court battle. Now in court, the prosecution goes first, and the defense follows, so the books I read and the order of reading were: (1) Slander ..., by Ann Coulter
(2) Treason ..., by Ann Coulter
(3) Let Freedom Ring ..., by Sean Hannity
(4) Big Lies ..., by Joe Conason
(5) The Hunting of the President ..., by Conason and Lyons
(6) Blinded by the Right ..., by David Brock Anyone who can take this little six-book journey and come away impressed by the likes of Coulter and Hannity has got to have a screw loose, in my humble opinion. Their so-called research doesn't hold up under the slightest scrutiny, and there are almost no primary sources listed in the "academic looking" end notes. This journey shows a person how "push-polling" works to slander a political opponent, how to lie with quarter-truths and innuendo effectively, and how to manipulate single-issue voters like the Religious Right with an anti-abortion stance, all the while selling those voter's children into effective slavery with Wal-Mart level jobs. To paraphrase a man from 50 years ago: "Have you no sense of decency, Coulter, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" And indeed they don't. The only real question is how long we will allow ourselves to be distracted by this power-hungry side-show of neo-con partisans masquerading as journalists and investigators. How many Enrons and Jimmy Swaggerts does it take before we all see that the neo-cons have no clothes, just juicy book deals and radio shows designed to help loot the nation without us noticing. Maybe 30 years from now they will be willing to use their skills to relate "The Fall of the American Empire" to which they will have contributed so much.
Rating:
Summary: Racist, hateful woman
Review: Many have said enough against this woman's book and her wicked views. I just felt I needed to add my 2 cents. If you like to hate, if you like to scorn, if you like to lie, then you'll like this book. Every other sane person should pass on it, and anything else written by this monster.
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