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Liberals, beware: there's a new sheriff in town, and she aims to clean up the place. A virtual unknown just four years ago, Ann Coulter has established herself as conservatism's sharpest, funniest, most incandescent polemicist. Her book, Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, is a thermonuclear counterattack on dishonest liberals and their fellow travelers in the media.
Here's some bedrock liberal fiction: Democrats (FDR, JFK, Adlai Stevenson, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Bradley, Al Gore) are all smart. Republicans (Dwight Eisenhower, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Bush I and II, Dan Quayle) are dumb. Coulter carefully deconstructs this template with devastating effect, right down to the SAT scores. In fact, some of the funniest lines are the quotes from various media sources about Al Gore's being "too smart to be president," and "impatient with those a few IQ points short of genius" with all his heavy thinking about Goethe, chaos theory and global warming. This about a fellow who was stumped as to the identity of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin when he saw their images at Monticello. And isn't it surprising that the "cerebral" Bill Bradley couldn't crack 500 on the verbal portion of the SAT? Coulter doesn't need a joke writer; the liberals provide all the punch lines. Dan Rather opines that "Clinton is an honest man." Jesse Jackson avers that conservatism is the same as Naziism. The indispensable Charles Rangel reminds us that with Republicans "It's not "nigger" or 'spic' anymore. It's 'let's cut taxes.'" Major Owens, a New York Democrat, points out that Republicans are practicing "genocide with a smile" and are "worse than Hitler." Coulter brilliantly contrasts a fawning media machine that lionizes the trivial accomplishments of a Gloria Steinem with the concerted blackout of the redoubtable Phyllis Schlafly. While Steinem prattled endlessly about lipstick and attended DNC parties where condoms were passed out as party favors, Schlafly built a reputation as a defense expert, became a formidable national political force, raised six accomplished children, and found time to single-handedly stop the ERA. In a particularly delicious section, Coulter trains her spotlight on Hillary Clinton, who is found sputtering about how dangerous all the free information on the internet is, particularly when it involves facts about her husband's innumerable scandals. Democrats are the champions of free speech as long as it's approved by their censors. A fascinating chapter deals with the Religious Right: the liberals can't seem to decide if all believers are idiots, or are so devious and powerful that they're about to take over the country. Don't bother to put phrases like "atheist left" into a computer search of the New York Times. You'll come up empty-handed. Slander is a marvel of compressed brilliance. It will educate you, enrage you, and make you laugh out loud. (Crown Publishers, 2002, 240 pps., $25.95) |
With her trademark slashing wit, Coulter exhaustively catalogues years of leftist myth-mongering. The meticulous assembly of quotes from prominent Democrats and their media mouthpieces is the real source of the book's shock value. Liberals have controlled the media for a quarter-century, and, as Coulter demonstrates, their hegemony has apparently robbed them of the ability to argue coherently. They simply shout their opponents down or just call them "stupid."
