Dukehorn: I would cheerfully attempt to defend Coulter’s scholarship, if I felt it existed. I made it clear that she is nothing other than entertainment value, and a shock jock used by the right as a lightning rod.
I would also point out that attempting a linkage between a professorship and a commensurate standard of care when discussing Naomi Wolf’s work is specious, at best. If an author is representing things as facts, then a responsibility exists as regards research, annotation and proper attribution. This is the same beef I have with Michael Moore and his “documentaries”. He is a propagandist, pure and simple, with a very loose grasp of timelines, facts, and supporting documentation. I would characterize Coulter, Wolf and Moore as all occupying the same ground: Churning out propaganda designed to inflame and incite, but not educate.
There is no way that I would even attempt to argue that Coulter is not a hate monger. As I just said, she is there to inflame and incite, not be the sweet voice of reason. She plays the role of Leni Riefenstahl to perfection, and let’s leave it at that.
As to Wolf attempting to make the world a better place, well, her history shows she is a self-serving, self-aggrandizing publicity and attention hound, and also known for pushing a very aggressive, and somewhat hateful, post-feminist agenda.
On the German versus Japanese front: There is an excellent book called “War Without Mercy” that does a thorough job of discussing what the author calls the “two wars” (European Theater of Operations and Pacific Theater of Operations). Rather than attempting to go into any depth, suffice it to say there is no way an atomic bomb would have been dropped on Berlin.
Personally, my uncle, who was a Marine fighter pilot in WWII, told me how the flight instructors said that Japanese pilots had poor eyesight (because of their slanted eyes), poor reflexes (too much rice in their diet) and lacked proper motor skills (apparently chalked up to being carried around on their mother’s backs for too long). Obviously, none of this was true (the Japanese were excellent pilots), but it goes to your theory as to how American servicemen perceived German and Japanese adversaries differently.