Ann Coulter - Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

ANN COULTER

SLANDER

LIBERAL LIES ABOUT

THE AMERICAN RIGHT

CROWN PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Copyright 2002 by Ann Coulter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Crown Publishers, New York, New York.

Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com

CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coulter, Ann H.

Slander : liberal lies about the American right / Ann Coulter.

Includes index.

1. LiberalismUnited States.

2. Mass mediaPolitical aspectsUnited States.

I. Title.

JC574.2.U6 C68 2002

320.520973dc21 2002006049

ISBN 1-4000-4661-0 10 987654321

FOR ROBERT JONES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my long-suffering friends who give me ideas and editing advice, which I habitually ignore. Among them are Hans Bader, Frank Bruni, Elli Burkett, Jim Downey, Miguel Estrada, Melanie Graham, David Limbaugh, Jay Mann, John Harrison, Gene Meyer, Jim Moody, Jeremy Rabkin, and Jon Tukel. In the event that any of them are nominated to confirmable positions or work for the New York Times: They are absolutely not responsible for what I write.

Also not responsible for what I write is my amazing, brilliant editor, Doug Pepper, proving that I dont dislike editors as a class, and my sainted agent, Joni Evans.

Novenas should be said to Brent Bozell and the Media Research Center, who have been on the case long before I was.

Thanks always and forever most of all to my two brothers, John and Jim, and my parents, Mother and Father.

Finally, with sincerest thanks to Pinch Sulzberger and the entire staff of the New York Times, without whom this book would have been impossible.

CONTENTS

ONE LIBERALS UNHINGED 1

TWO THE GUCCI POSITION ON DOMESTIC POLICY 27

THREE HOW TO GO FROM BEING A JUT-JAWED

MAVERICK TO A CLUELESS NEANDERTHAL

IN ONE EASY STEP 45

FOUR CREATING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLIMATE 56

FIVE ADVANCE AS IF UNDER THREAT OF ATTACK:

FOX NEWS CHANNEL AND THE ELECTION 75

SIX SAMIZDAT MEDIA

SEVEN THE JOY OF ARGUING WITH LIBERALS:

YOURE STUPID! 121

EIGHT CLEVER IS AS CLEVER DOES:

THE LIBERAL DILEMMA 151

NINE SHADOWBOXING THE

APOCRYPHAL RELIGIOUS RIGHT 166

CONCLUSION 197

NOTES 206

INDEX 243

slander

ONE

liberals unhinged

The natives are superficially agreeable, but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth.

margaret mead

Political debate in this country is insufferable. Whether conducted in Congress, on the political talk shows, or played out at dinners and cocktail parties, politics is a nasty sport. At the risk of giving away the ending: Its all liberals fault.

As there is less to dispute, liberals have become more bitter and angry. The Soviet threat has been vaporized, women are not prevented from doing even things they should be, and the gravest danger facing most black Americans today is the risk of being patronized to death.

And yet still, somehow, Tom DeLay (Republican congressman from Texas) poses a monumental threat to democracy as we know it. The left expresses disagreement with DeLays governing philosophy by calling him the Meanest Man in Congress, Dangerous, the Hammer, the Exterminator, and the Torquemada of Texas. For his evident belief in a Higher Being, DeLay is compared to savage murderers and genocidal lunatics on the pages of the New York Times. (History teaches that when religion is injected into politicsthe Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovodisaster follows.)

Liberals dispute slight reductions in the marginal tax rates as if they are trying to prevent Charles Manson from slaughtering baby seals. Progress cannot be made on serious issues because one side is making arguments and the other side is throwing eggsboth figuratively and literally. Prevarication and denigration are the hallmarks of liberal argument. Logic is not their metier. Blind religious faith is.

The liberal catechism includes a hatred of Christians, guns, the profit motive, and political speech and an infatuation with abortion, the environment, and race discrimination (or in the favored parlance of liberals, affirmative action). Heresy on any of these subjects is, well, heresy. The most crazed religious fanatic argues in more calm and reasoned tones than liberals responding to statistics on concealed-carry permits.

Perhaps if conservatives had had total control over every major means of news dissemination for a quarter century, they would have forgotten how to debate, too, and would just call liberals stupid and mean. But thats an alternative universe. In this universe, the public square is wall-to-wall liberal propaganda.

Americans wake up in the morning to Americas Sweetheart, the Today shows Katie Couric, berating Arlen Specter about Anita Hill ten years after the hearings. Or haranguing Charlton Heston on the need for gun control to stop school shootings. Her co-host, Matt Lauer, wonders casually why the federal government has not passed a law on national vacation time. The New York Times breathlessly announces Communism Still Looms as Evil to Miami Cubans and Time magazine columnist Barbara Ehrenreich gives two thumbs up to The Communist Manifesto (100 million massacred!).

We read letters to the editor of the New York Times from pathetic little parakeet males and grim, quivering, angry women on the Upper West Side of Manhattan hoping to be chosen as that days purveyor of hate. These letters are about one step above Tiger Beat magazine in intellectual engagement. They are never responsive, they never include clever ripostes or attacks; they merely restate the position of the Times with greater venom: / was reminded by your editorial that Bush wasnt even your average -politically aware Yalie; he was too busy branding freshmen at his fraternity house.

In the evening, CBS anchor Dan Rather can be found falsely accusing Republicans of all manner of malfeasance or remarking that a president who has been impeached, disbarred, and held in contempt for his lies is an honest man. Diane Sawyer pronounces that the American people are yawning at the news that the president was engaging in sodomy with a cigar and oral-anal sex with a White House intern.

Hollywood movies preach about kind-hearted abortionists, Nazi priests, rich preppie Republican bigots, and the dark night of fascism under Senator Joe McCarthy. Hollywood starlets giddily announce on late-night TV how much theyd like to give Bill Clinton a certain type of sex (as Paula Jones called it).

And then Americans wake up for another day of left-wing schlock, beginning their day with the CBS Early Shows Bryant Gumbel somberly asking smut peddler Hugh Hefner for his views on a presidential campaign.

We read national magazines that pretend to be reasonable while seething with the impotent violence of women. We wade through preposterous news stories on Enron, global warming, Tawana Brawley, plastic guns, the melting North Pole, the meaning of the word isuntil you cant keep up with the wave of lies. Its like being in an earthquake listening to all the gibberish.

When arguments are premised on lies, there is no foundation for debate. You end up conceding to half the lies simply to focus on the lies of Holocaust-denial proportions. Kind and well-meaning people find themselves afraid to talk about politics. Any sentient person has to be concerned that he might innocently make an argument or employ a turn of phrase that will be Discerned by the liberal cult as a code word evincing a genocidal tendency. The only safe course is to be consciously, stultifyingly boring.