Who is the Greatest Conservative Debater?

[Jungle Fever]

Can't think of any that particularly impressed me, with the exception of a few quasi-conservatives. Who really knows how to shake up the rats?

[DAC22]

If given a chance I think Mark Steyn could skewer a few RATS

[binkdeville]

Good choice bro...Mark is a wordsmith for sure.

[Richard Kimball]

Did someone mention dumb blondes?

BTW, as to Limbaugh, he articulates an argument well, but gets a train of thought and follows it through. He doesn't shift gears quickly on the fly. He's an original thinker, but when I saw him a few times on panel shows, he was very deferential, and wouldn't challenge people. Alan Keyes is an excellent debater, but is a little flaky. Walter Williams would, I think, debate well, as would Mark Steyn. Steyn might be our best conservative thinker, right now.

Coulter can play the full contact debate game that many liberals like to play, but it's difficult to debate one.

"Mr. Begala, there's documented evidence of Saddam using chemical weapons in the past."
"Well, what about the way Richard Nixon used to act all the time, huh? And you call that justice!"

There's so much topic jumping and random charges that it's difficult to come away with anything more enlightening than the dead parrot skit.

[Richard Kimball]

I had forgotten about Horowitz. He's not only brilliant, having been one of them, he understands the mind set. Good choice.

[JohnG45]

Ann Coulter is a shallow-head ditz.

Post #43 has it right.

What planet are you from?

[Calpernia]

>>>>Who is the Greatest Conservative Debater?

11 June 2004 - Listening to the Great Communicator
by Laura Mansfield

As I watched the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan, the camera panned the audience in Washington's National Cathedral. Those who came to show their respects to the Gipper encompassed a wide spectrum. Some were long-time friends; some were former adversaries; others were just children when President Reagan lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But all shared one thing in common: respect. President Reagan was a man who earned the respect of the world.

He didn't earn that respect because he was a nice guy, although I'm sure he was. He didn't earn the respect because of his looks, although his movie-star appearance was certainly not a liability.

Many called Reagan "the Great Communicator". That was a well-earned aphorism. His communications skills weren't limited to excellent public speaking techniques; nor did they derive from stage training and movie rehearsals.

His power as a communicator came from the simple fact that when he said something, he meant it. He backed up his words with actions. When Ronald Reagan said he was going to do something, he did it. And everyone knew it.

The first inkling many had of the importance of this ability and how it would impact us as a nation was in 1980, during his campaign for the Presidency.

In November of 1979, Islamic militant students in Iran took over the United States Embassy in Tehran, seizing 63 American hostages. A military rescue attempt had failed in April of that year; the bodies of US military personnel who died in the aborted rescue attempt were desecrated, and at least one was decapitated. As the presidential campaign heated up during the summer and fall months of 1980, the Islamic militants and the government of Iran remained intransigent; the hostages remained locked in the embassy.

The patience of the American public was exhausted. Candidate Reagan promised he would bring our citizens home one way or another, using force if necessary, and the American people believed him. They voiced their agreement at the ballot box, and America had a new President.

The government of Iran believed him too. As President Reagan took his oath of office on January 21, 1981, news came over the networks: the American hostages had cleared Iranian airspace, and were free.

As the Reagan administration began, and with our citizens home from Tehran, attention turned to the home front. The economy was in desperate need of revitalization, and the concept of Reaganomics was born. But by 1982, attention was called back to the middle east. Lebanon was rapidly descending into civil war; the US sent troops to Beirut to help maintain order.

That task was easier said than done, and on April 18, 1983, Islamic militants killed 63 people, including the Middle East Bureau chief for the CIA. Later that year, on October 23, homicide bombers drove a truck packed with explosives into a barracks full of sleeping US Marines at the Beirut Airport, killing 241. President Reagan's statement was eerily prophetic, as he described a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the past few years:

"The evidence indicated that both vehicles were driven by radical Shiite fundamentalists, bent on the pursuit of suicidal martyrdom. They were members of the same group responsible for the barbarous bombing of our embassy in Beirut the previous April, a group whose religious leaders promised instant entry to Paradise for killing an enemy of Iran's theocracy. Nancy and I were in a state of grief, made almost speechless by the magnitude of the loss".

But only a decade had elapsed since the final US troops were airlifted out of Saigon, and America was still phobic about entering what could be "another Vietnam". The remaining US troops came home from Beirut.

The terror didn't stop. The US Embassy in Kuwait was attacked on December 12, 1983, along with the French embassy, the control tower at the airport, the country's main oil refinery, and a residential area for employees of the American corporation Raytheon. In the spring of 1984, CIA Station Chief William Buckley was kidnapped, marking the start of a wave of kidnappings that plagued war-torn Beirut. Throughout 1984 and 1985, planes were hijacked throughout the region, with American passengers being singled out for execution on many of the flights. The luxury cruise liner Achille Lauro was hijacked as well, and wheelchair bound US citizen Leon Klingenhoffer was shot and dumped overboard out of his wheelchair. There were airport attacks on US citizens during the Christmas holiday season in both Rome and Vienna.

All the attacks had one thing in common: Islamic fundamentalists were the perpetrators.

In April 1986, President Reagan had had enough. Too many Americans were dying at the hands of terrorists; negotiations, rewards, and the criminal justice system had all proven ineffective at stopping the violence. Military maneuvers showing force were equally ineffective. After the bombing of the La Belle Discotheque in West Berlin, Reagan's patience was exhausted. Investigative efforts showed Libya as the primary sponsor of the wave of terror. His response was to order airstrikes against Benghazi and Tripoli. One of the residences of Libyan leader Moamar Khadaffi was hit; Khadafi's adopted daughter Hanan was reportedly killed.

The effect was instantaneous. Two US hostages were killed in Lebanon in retaliation; then the wave of terror against Americans in the middle east stopped. L.Paul Bremer had the following comments regarding the effect of the US attacks on Libya:

I know for a fact that the attack on Libya had very important consequences. Number one, we had very clear intelligence that the Libyans had been planning 34 or 35 subsequent attacks on American targets in Europe. Those were stopped immediately. The intelligence was clear.

President Reagan had not only gotten the attention of the Islamic world; he had also earned their respect. I was in Cairo at the time of the Libyan attacks. At a social event the following evening, the US actions were discussed. One of the guests was an Egyptian Army General. Someone asked whether there would be reprisals against the United States from the Islamic radicals. The General's response was quick. "No, they will stop, because they don't know what he'll do next. He might "nuke" them!"

Nearly twenty years later we have come full circle. The United States is once again under attack by Islamic radicals. We could learn a lot from President Reagan's life; we need to learn the lessons of his Presidency.

Xenophobia, isolationalism, and inconsistency breed terrorism. It's not important that the rest of the world like us now; it is important that they respect us.

Firm, consistent, and forceful responses, without a lot of second guessing in the media, gets the point across.

As I looked at the audience in the cathedral this morning, I saw a new generation of leaders. Hamid Karzai from Afghanistan, Jordan's King Abdullah, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and many others. The old guard was there too: Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev paid their respects.

Four former US presidents (Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton) joined President George W. Bush at the ceremony.

Hopefully these world leaders who will chart our way into the future will heed the lessons left to us by President Reagan. After all, he wasn't called the Great Communicator for nothing.

[Snickersnee]

William Rusher

[Arrowhead1952]

I have something for you.

[ru4liberty]

Newt Gingrich and Thomas Sowell

[pollyannaish]

Speaking of Lynne Cheney...

I wouldn't want to bet against Dick Cheney. He has a quiet, efficient way of taking care of debate opponents. I like his style.

[Last Dakotan]

Buckley is brilliant, ... His pretentious 'accent'...

Is that what that is? The rest of us Midwesterners thought it was a speech defect.

[John Lenin]

[dangerdoc]

Okay, I've been here two years and I'm still not sure what a ZOT is. It has something to do with cats in headgear but not rabbits with pancakes on their head. Is there a freeper manual around here somewhere.

[BunnySlippers]

Smooth. Well spoken. In control. Right.

[BunnySlippers]

Toonces.

[John Lenin]

[al_again]

Scalia is excellent. PBS used to do a moderated round table where Scalia was a regular - it was great to watch him skewer the left.

[Richard Kimball]

Here's the closing of Reagan's farewell address to the nation. It always brings tears to my eyes:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

And how stand the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

We've done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger. We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.

And so, good-bye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

In the immortal words of Hank Hill, "God I miss voting for that man."

[quidnunc]

JohnG45 wrote: (Ann Coulter is a shallow-head ditz.) Post #43 has it right. What planet are you from?

As Hugh Hewett says, Ann Coulter is Michael Savage in heels.

She's not so much a debater as a polemacist.