Posted on 07/08/2002 4:59:49 AM PDT by IronJack
Somewhere in my Internet travels, I have come across an picture of Ann Coulter in cutoffs, sitting on a rather dilapidated porch, with what appears to be a bolt action rifle up to her shoulder sighting on something off camera. If the rifle had been a submachine gun, it would have made the perfect jacket photo for Ann’s new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.
Coulter, ever known for her rapier wit and relentless defense of conservatism, is in finest form in this recent work, which ironically, just ascended the New York Times bestseller list. In a homey yet biting voice, she skewers the Left’s weak attempts to project an outmoded, irrational agenda.
“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. … The most crazed religious fanatic argues in more calm and reasoned tones than liberals …” And that’s just on the first page.
Liberals can’t argue because their positions are not the result of reasoned analysis or a calm weighing of the facts. They come to their conclusions through the rote commitment of a litany, itself the product of hysteria, fear, and a calculated appeal to emotionalism. It’s hard to defeat the statistics on concealed carry laws, for example, but that doesn’t stop the Violence Policy Center from publishing such jeremiads as License to Kill, which assails Texas’ gun culture for sowing mythical urban killing fields. The intent is not to educate, but to stimulate, to quicken the pulse of frightened soccer moms and direct their inchoate angst against guns and the men who own them.
The techniques have ample precedent. Josef Goebbels used them quite successfully.
Coulter’s background as a constitutional scholar shows through, as she cuts through the thicket of liberal argle-bargle and reduces the counterpoint ad absurdo. In May of 2001, former Clinton lackeys James Carville and Paul Begala detailed their battle plan for Democrats in an editorial to the New York Times. The core of the piece was that the Left had to start attacking George Bush and his agenda: “First, call a radical a radical. [Peculiar advice coming from two of the most conscienceless radicals in the arena.] Mr. Bush’s agenda is neither compassionate nor conservative; it’s radical and it’s dangerous and the Democrats should say so.”
Coulter’s summary of that strategy: “That’s the new plan. It’s the same as the old plan. Call Republicans names.”
And she proceeds to list countless occasions on which Democrats – or their lap kitties in the media – slap labels on Republicans in a transparent attempt to forestall further discussion of perfectly valid points. In fact, she says, one of the cornerstones of Democratic rhetoric these days is to point out that conservatives are all either stupid, ugly, or stupid and ugly. Katherine Harris was pilloried for wearing too much eye makeup (as if Helen Thomas is a thing of beauty); Linda Tripp’s ethical conundrum was reduced to irrelevance in light of her physical shortcomings (like Hillary Clinton is a lingerie model); and Ronald Reagan was a doddering fool who made foreign policy between naps and consultations with Obay seers.
Odd how the lamentable physiognomy of Bella Abzug and her legion of gargoyles didn’t diminish the incalculable beneficence of her message. And Al Gore’s repeated failures in post-secondary education don’t seem to disqualify him for the presidency, although George W. Bush’s mediocre performance at Yale seems to indict his mental acuity.
These aren’t the reasoned arguments of informed debaters, Coulter declares, but the playground antics of frustrated children. The liberal cause attracts only those people who are willing to ground their philosophy in puerile epithets, which explains why more and more, the Left is home to the unbalanced, the marginal, and the closet psychotic.
The Left also attacks conservative culture in similar broad strokes. Rush Limbaugh is a favorite target of the venom-spewers, who are livid with frustration because they can’t catch him in a lie. The New York Times, liberalism’s knee-calloused handmaiden, commits egregious errors of fact in virtually every edition, not even including those omissions calculated to disinform or the bias that saturates their pages with Right-Wing Follies. Yet a minor error in language on a Limbaugh show had the harpies of the Left howling “Slander!” and “Fiction!”
When NBC News staged an explosion in a pickup gas tank, or when ABC entrapped a Food Lion store in a “news” report, the Left’s silence was deafening. But when Dan Quayle implied that perhaps Murphy Brown was a poor model for motherhood, he was roundly racked for taking television too seriously. Coulter lists pages of similar incidents in which liberal champions march so frequently into their own maws that they give themselves athlete’s tongue.
Yet still the duplicity thrives: still candidate Bush is expected to know the leaders of five of the world’s more obscure countries, still candidate Quayle is supposed to know that “potato” is the preferred spelling, while “potatoe” is a symptom of right-wing incompetence.
Worst of all, Ann says, is that substantive issues disappear behind these clouds of inanity. Does Quayle’s addition of a “e” render him unfit for the Chief Executive? What of his other strengths? What of his plan for foreign policy, or a cap on fiscal expenditures? What of his governing philosophy, his regard for the sanctity of home, hearth, and family? Sorry, but those aren’t important beside his clumsy handling of grammar and an occasional spelling faux pas. Since Phyllis Schlafly isn’t one of the Beautiful People, her one-woman crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment is of little import, while Gloria Steinem’s repeated business failures and trivial epigrams make her a guiding light for modern women.
In the end, Coulter says, the Left has little to resort to except slander. Their lies have become their substance, even as their house of cards grows shakier every day. The Internet – Free Republic is mentioned prominently as a bellwether of the Brave New World of communications – and other technological developments have freed the captive audiences of the mass media, and truth is creeping into the discourse like kudzu after a rainstorm.
“This isn’t merely to say that liberals have near-exclusive control over all major sources of information in this country, though that is true. Nor is the point that liberals are narrow-minded and parochial, incapable of seeing the other fellow’s point of view, though that is also true. And it’s not that, as a consequence, liberals impute inhumanity to their political opponents and are unfathomably hateful and vicious. That’s true too. The point is that conservatives in America are the most tolerant (and long-suffering) people in the world. The already have ‘met and spent time with’ liberals. They do it every day, day in, day out, their entire lives.”
The result is that they are slandered by the Left, who have only lies to rely on and hatred as their redemption.
On second thought, maybe that rifle should have been replaced with a shotgun. Or a flamethrower …
My nominee for Quote of the Day. Classic and true.
And when they do, they make her point for her.
The execellent footnotes and research will prevent the left from doing anything but an ad hominem attack. Lots of stuff for some of our spineless RINOs to use, if they can muster the backbone.
I disagree: they seldom remain in the closet!
People who call themselves Republicans are in fact RINO's and Republican voters support these turds.
Many thanks.
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