Another Preposterous Premise: Demonic Makes It Impossible To Take Ann Coulter Seriously.

The Good: The writing uses decent grammar and spelling . . . There are citations.
The Bad: Flawed premise, Terrible arguments, Generalizations that are ridiculous used to establish arguments.
The Basics: In her latest, Ann Coulter preaches to her choir that liberals are a bunch of idiotic pack animals in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.


In the past when I have reviewed a work of Ann Coulter's, I have spent an inordinate amount of time simply arguing against her latest rants, theories or arguments. With her latest, Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, I have vowed not to do that, if for no other reason than refuting the 295 page (355 after the citations and index) book would be a book or two in and of itself. But more than anything else, Demonic is a much easier volume of Coulter's literature to refute because the basic premise is so overblown and contrived as to make the arguments that follow it - and some of them are well reasoned if one accepts the initial, deeply flawed, premise - collapse under the weight of that initial assessment.

So I shall start instead by thanking Ann Coulter. Coulter caused me to learn a new word. On page 5 of Demonic, she writes "They [liberals] stage campaigns of calumny to get their way on gay marriage." "Campaigns of calumny" is pretty decent alliteration, but I had honestly never heard the word "calumny" before, so I had to look it up. Calumny, as it turns out, is libel or slander. So, I got to thinking, who did the Gay Rights Movement smear in order to get marriage equality? They called out the Reactionary Right for creating a separate and unequal legal situation and demanded it be rectified. They identified the problem correctly, identified the adversary who was perpetrating the problem and sought to end the injustice. I cannot come up with a single instance that liberals, gays, lesbians and/or bisexuals or Unitarians (for whom gay marriage has been legal for pretty much ever and it was a matter of church and state to have the discrimination) smeared anyone while trying to get the right.

Regardless, I learned a new word by reading Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America and I suppose there is some value to that. Unfortunately, the book that followed was a painfully inept argument that equates being a liberal with being a dumb sheep who follows only mob reasoning. Her thesis is made explicit rather late in the book when Coulter brazenly declares "Liberals are people whose entire lives are consumed with following the crowd" (260). Such a dramatic oversimplification is so easy to debase that it almost makes the rest of the review of the book utterly pointless.

I am a liberal, proudly, and I am not like any other liberal I know. Moreover, none of the liberals I know are nearly as monolithic as Coulter makes them out to be. Coulter buys into the stereotype - and perpetrates the stereotype popular among many conservatives who seek to demonize liberals - that liberals are all baby-killing, gun-hating, anti-capitalist, queers who hate the family, god, freedom and America. In fact, one of the most preposterous lines in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America is when Coulter declares "Democrats disdain Americans, so unlike the Europeans they fetishize. . . " (187). Since when are Democrats not Americans?! I'm a liberal and I don't fetishize the Europeans. In fact, the only European elements I truly admire are the ones where European nations followed the model of the United States and rebelled against tyranny and then continued to fight for freedom, liberty and a sense of cultural responsibility, which is something many liberals, like myself, believe the United States has lost. That does not make us less American, if anything, it makes us more!

But to go back to the fundamental issue with Ann Coulter and Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, Coulter equates Democrats with liberals (very few of us liberals actually look at the Democratic Party as the bastion of liberal philosophy anymore) and then makes many of her arguments equating the two interchangeably (and ridiculously). While she makes many arguments using historic examples - and distant ones - her equating Democrats and liberals alternates from the improbable to the ridiculous. So, for example, pages 260 and 261 are consumed with a joke David Letterman made wherein he mistook Willow Palin for Bristol Palin and made a date rape joke using the baseball player Alex Rodriguez. This entire absurd argument about how banal the joke is and how utterly wrong it was is relevant only if one accepts the premises that: 1. David Letterman (and/or his writers) are liberal, 2. Liberals actually found the joke or David Letterman funny and/or 3. Liberals are unable to distinguish between humor and fact and good humor and bad humor. My point here is that Coulter in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America uses examples like tired humor from people utterly unconnected with Democrats or liberal philosophy and then tries to turn the bad humor on Democrats and liberals with examples of how she could write jokes in equally bad taste.

But to go back to the basic idea, liberals are not monophilosophical, like they are presented in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. I'm not necessarily for the legalization of marijuana, I'm not for the death penalty - though I make exceptions for serial sexual predators - and unlike Coulter's assertion on page 103, I love my wood-burning fireplace. Check it out, I reviewed it here! Coulter declaring what liberals like and dislike is akin to me declaring that all capitalists are obsessed with one flavor of ice cream. I am able to easily make the distinction, but Coulter does not seem to be. I, for example, am able to distinguish between truly evil people and those who just are not on my side. Coulter is not, like when calls Janeane Garofalo one of ". . . the world's most fiendish tyrants. . ." (29). And while with some writers, that might seem like evidence of a sense of humor or irony, but she is so straightlaced in her narrative throughout that she declares Garofalo a nemesis just the way she treats other liberals.

In addition to the way the book predicates so many false premises on inapt analogies, Coulter skews her own arguments. Demonic follows on Coulter's long tradition of fighting for gun owner's rights. Coulter, a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, has made the argument frequently that gun user's are responsible for their actions. However, she conveniently changes her position when it comes to blaming a liberal, as she does when she states "Angela Davis, former Black Panther, was the legal owner of the guns the Panthers used to blow off the head of Marin County judge Harold Haley in an attempt to free Davis's boyfriend, George Jackson. Today she is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz" (170). The distinction here is all-important: in other works and arguments, she despises "guilt by association" and yet here she tries to equate Davis as a murderer because she owned guns that were used in a crime. Why shouldn't Davis be a teacher? She didn't kill anyone!

Demonic is a long series of arguments that pit Republicans as heroes, Democrats as evil, declaring "Republicans are the party of peaceful order [tell that to an Iraqui!]; Democrats are the party of noisy, violent mobs" (295). If you buy that oversimplification, then Demonic might work out for you. It doesn't work out for me and despite her many ridiculous statements on liberals, like me, like her assertion on 249, I would not like to be punched in the face for any reason. Reading Demonic is like getting punched in the face for anyone with a sense of reason.

For other books by Ann Coulter, please check out my reviews of:
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
Godless: The Church Of Liberalism
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must): The World According To Ann Coulter
Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism
Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right
High Crimes And Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton

1.5/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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One Long Inapt Analogy Plagues The Premise Of Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church Of Liberalism Argument!

The Good: I'm sure it speaks to the base quite well, Includes citations
The Bad: The case Coulter makes is based on analogy that doesn't hold, Point is never explained, Pandering
The Basics: With attacks on public institutions and ideals-some of which are only vaguely tied to liberalism-Ann Coulter sets the criteria for an unconvincing and poorly-argued comparison between liberalism and religion.


Coming off the high of potentially being a target of Ann Coulter's that she may have referenced in her latest book, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans, I felt I might try to continue the trend of raising the ire of the conservative commentator by continuing to read her books and review them as objectively as possible. Like Coulter, I like the attention of being referenced by those I consider my adversaries; we apparently both went to the same school of "keeping your name in the press is a good thing." So, when I picked up Godless: The Church Of Liberalism by Ann Coulter, I had a feeling I would have a good time regardless. After sitting down and reading the book, I'm ready for some of that fun I promised myself when I began reading this 304 page argument that liberalism is a religion.

I will no doubt use the word "disingenuous" several times throughout this review, but I wish to comment first on the cover of the book (something I don't believe I've ever done for one of my book reviews!) and use the word "pandering." Ann Coulter's text is an extended argument that is venomous when it is not being flawed, attempting to create an analogy that does not fit given her own criteria. The way Coulter attempts to sell the book is by pandering shamelessly to her base. This is illustrated very clearly as I sit with my copy of Godless out next to the rest of the Ann Coulter library that I have available (it's missing her 2003 release) and look over the images of Coulter on each cover. Yes, it is ONLY on Godless that Coulter is wearing her crucifix. Even her current book does not have her on the cover wearing a crucifix. So, I did a quick check out her website. The thumbnail images are hard to make out for details like a cross, but only on the screen captures from shows on FoxNews does she appear to have a necklace (cross not visible). So here, from the front cover, Coulter clearly establishes that her purpose is not so much to make an unbiased or well-developed argument comparing liberalism with religious devotion, but rather to condemn liberalism and promote Christianity. That she does this in such an obvious and insulting way, including promoting her Christianity in a way that she did not before nor since on her books, is straightforward pandering to her base.

With 304 pages including eleven easy-to-read chapters, cited footnotes and acknowledgments, Godless: The Church Of Liberalism is Ann Coulter's pointed argument with one clear purpose which opens the book and appears on the back cover. Coulter believes that liberalism is a religion, one that she judges to be both antithetical to god, Christianity and America. Stated explicitly in its opening paragraphs, Coulter declares, "Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion'" (1). What follows in the ten chapters after that assertion and criteria is the argument that links her definition of religion to the philosophies of liberalism.

Not to poke too harshly at Coulter's argument right off the bat, but her criteria begin her argument on an academically biased footing. The inclusion of miracles, churches, priests and saints are all subjective, biased religious views based on Coulter's own brand of Christianity. There are religions major and minor that do not utilize churches, believe in miracles, organize around a priest, and/or believe in saints or any reasonable facsimile. Even various many denominations of Christianity do not believe in saints! So when one applies religions such as Bhuddism, Shintoism, Judaism, and the religions of most of the indigenous people of North America, South America and Africa to those same standards, none of them fall into the Coulter concept of "generally known" religions. Indeed, a quick check for a definition of "religion" on Dictionary.com citing the Random House dictionary, defines religion much more broadly as: "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe. . . " (definition 1) and "a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects. . ." (definition 2). Despite this premise which is hardly as universal as Coulter would like her readers to believe, Godless defines this as the formula by which a religion is generally established. So, there needs to be: a cosmology, miracles, supernatural beliefs, churches, high priests, saints, worldview, and explanation of the universe.

The problem with these criteria are that a fair number of competing concepts actually meet the same eight essential criteria. Off the top of my head, organized sports, television programs and, well, constitutional democracy in the United States all would be religions that Coulter neglects to demonize the way she attacks liberals. So, for example, with sports (I'm going with NFL football as an example, so please bear with me I'm not that into sports): those who follow football have teams (with their assorted players), the hail mary pass that connects, rituals involving luck, stadiums, coaches/commentators, quarterbacks, the goal of a touchdown and "life exists for Sunday and Monday night" that meet the same qualifications (okay, the last is a stretch). Television, though, has a slew of programs that are essentially religions to their fans. Take Star Trek, something I am quiet fluent with. Believers in that religion (as Coulter defines it) have the captains and their crews (Star Trek even has a holy trinity of Kirk, Spock and McCoy), the rescue of Kirk from the interspace, the Prophets who mystically control the Bajoran Wormhole (or warp drive, either qualifies as supernatural), Conventions and museums, Gene Roddenberry, directors and producers, humanism, and the Big Bang for creation of the universe. Back in 1991 during the 25th Anniversary of Star Trek, the televised special that commemorated the event cited over 50% of people in the U.S. consider themselves Star Trek fans. By Coulter's criteria, this would be an even far greater threat to conservatism and Christianity than liberalism.

The far more serious problem with Coulter's definition and the argument that follows it is that by her own criteria, Constitutional Democracy in the United States would be a far more common and compelling religion than even liberalism. After all, there is a cosmology (three branches of government), miracles (upset elections), supernatural belief (the belief that politicians will overcome human nature and abide by the principles of the Constitution or that voting works), churches (the White House, town hall, Capitol Building), high priests (presidents), saints (snicker, I was going to go with Senators, but let's go with Martin Luther King Jr. instead), worldview (representative democracy works, freedom is essential to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, etc.), and explanation of the universe (people are born free with an inherent right to self-determination, our history). The vast majority of people reading Godless are people who subscribe to this belief system every day and the idea that Coulter does not address this is an intellectual neglect that is staggering in its scope.

But, of course, Godless: The Church Of Liberalism is not intended as an argument that clearly addresses the problems the United States faces today, but rather it is intended as an attack treatise on the beliefs of those who oppose the conservative agenda in America packaged up in a neat structure guaranteed to appeal to Coulter's audience. After all, why simply deconstruct your opponents movement when you can vilify them as a religion? Passion for religion inspires acts of great compassion, to be sure, but in the political arena it is more often utilized as a divisive tool and framing liberalism as a religion contrary to Christianity and conservatism is designed to inflame.

But this is grossly neglectful of the facts, which illustrate that historically many of the most effective liberal causes were aided by people who were devout Christians. When it is convenient for her arguments - none of which appear in Godless - I am certain Coulter would make such an argument, but given that Coulter is attempting to pit liberalism against Christianity with this book, it simply does not serve her purpose. As a result, Coulter's academic disinginuity forces her to neglect the role liberal Christians played in the abolition of slavery, the women's suffrage movement, the end of segregation and the establishment of humane treatment standards for the mentally ill. Regardless of any politics of mine, it is impossible to make an argument that is factually true that divorces liberal philosophy from the Christian morals espoused by the leaders of any of those major movements.

It is a disingenuous argument and one that Coulter utterly fails to make in Godless. Instead, she sacrifices even the appearance of academic honesty and intellectual debate in favor of some of the grossest overuses of logical fallacies to see print. The primary problem with Godless, in the text that Coulter has written as opposed to the myriad of arguments against her basic premise, is that Coulter herself defines what the various aspects of the "religion" of liberalism are. So, for example, Chapter 3 devoted eighteen pages to defining Willie Horton as the martyr of the liberals. Coulter herself speaks for liberals when she writes, "In liberal mythology, Horton is a martyr, but instead of spilling his own blood, he spilled other people's blood" (61). The problem with this whole line of reasoning can be summed up in two easy sentences; first a martyr is traditionally someone who has been persecuted and killed for the cause or religion. Second, I couldn't find a single liberal who would consider Willie Horton a martyr for their cause and, in fact, most young liberals I talked to didn't even know who he was. While preparing this review, I polled ten random liberals at my local library and after determining they were liberal with the question "Do you consider yourself a liberal?," I simply asked, "If liberalism were a religion, who would the martyrs be?" The answers were pretty direct: five people chose Martin Luther King Jr., four chose JFK, and one declared Robert F. Kennedy (in the interest of honest methodology, it is worth noting that those being asked were not together and did not hear one another's answers and one initially answered "Do I have to pick just one?" And I think the person who picked RFK was just being trendy.). None of the three first choices by, admittedly, a limited sampling of self-declared liberals came up with anyone remotely close to Willie Horton. Of course, Coulter's case is going to be made when she stacks the argument toward the targets she's prepared to attack. For the record, there is no mention of JKF, RKF or Dr. King in Godless. But for a book published in 2006, it seems like the argument is a bit of a stretch if she had to go back to the 1988 presidential campaign to pull a martyr. (If "living martyrs" were her point, Al Gore would have seemed like a ridiculously easy one to use!)

Godless: The Church Of Liberalism is sloppy in its application of its own argument. As with Willie Horton being defined as a martyr, Coulter's selection of abortion as the sacrament of liberalism is an utterly fallacious correlation. Sacraments are rituals, actions or bonds that bring one closer to their faith and (in religions with them) their god. For example, baptism, confirmation, marriage, are all consider sacraments in Christianity. In order for abortion to be a sacrament in the religion of liberalism, only women could be truly "holy" liberals, women would have to want to have abortions as a matter of faith and principle, and there would be no stigma against it. Actually, that last part isn't entirely true; if abortion were the sacrament of liberalism, it would become a Constitutionally protected action under the Freedom of Religion. But, again, the connection is inapt as a vast number of liberals never have abortions. To liken abortion to a sacrament and carry it back, the analogy would be that crucifixion is a Christian sacrament.

Whenever Coulter encounters a statement that does not fit her argument or rhetoric, she simply dismisses it. So, for example, while discussing abortion, she cites an interview from "60 Minutes" with a Dr. Hern who declared, about the term "partial-birth abortion," "It's a political term; has no medical meaning" (80). Coulter responds by observing, "This is opposed to precise medical terms like choice and back alley abortions. . ." (80), but the problems here are that no one is claiming choice or back alley abortions are medical terms and it still does not address the fact that Congress is legislating a procedure that does not describe any specific medical practice. The whole chapter with abortion as a sacrament becomes a weak excuse for Coulter to expound on her views on abortion and its evils.

Moreover, Coulter does not allow fact to get in the way of her sweeping generalities. She brazenly declares, "No Republican is so crazily obsessed with any issue as the Democrats are with abortion" (85) which suggests that no Republican has used being against abortion to win elections or legislate to the extent that their competing Democrat used being for choice to win or legislate. This is one of many, many uncited "facts" Coulter declares as if it were gospel truth on no authority other than her word. Ironically, Coulter declares that liberals, ". . .assert that what they assert is true because they assert it" (279), moments after she does exactly the same thing by declaring without citation "Even when liberals are trying to show their moderate, country-music loving side by claiming to oppose having sex with the family dog, they can't formulate a logical argument to explain why not" (279).

This is not at all to say that Coulter does not cite her works. In fact, there are nineteen pages of cited references collected in the back of the book. The problem is, often Coulter is citing opinions of her opposition, allowing her to attack other commentators as opposed to attacking their arguments. So, for example on page 280 when she cites a quote of a black activist, a reader might take it as a declarative statement, when as a check of the footnote reveals, it was a line referenced in another person's editorial. In this fashion Coulter attempts to pawn off an opinion of an opinion as a fact.

And whenever reason and logic fail her, Coulter degenerates into the most insulting form of ad hominem possible. Yes, she calls her opposition names. In explaining why public school teachers are a Hollywood cliche, she states, "In real life, these taxpayer-supported parasites are inculcating students in the precepts of the Socialist Party of America - as understood by retarded people" (148). "Retard" seems to be a favorite of Coulter's in Godless (alas, it does not appear in the index and I'm not about to go back through the book to recount them) as are descriptions of opposing lines of thought as "loony," non-Christian environmentalists as "Druids," and widespread use of the word "nutty."

Coulter declares her premise on page one and three hundred pages later, she is no closer to proving her idea. For sure, she has insulted public schools, Bill Clinton (it's a timely book!), death penalty opponents, scientists, women and anyone who does not subscribe to her narrow view of Judeo-Christian beliefs. But she has not illustrated that liberalism is a religion.

Or more importantly, and here is where the dogma of Ann Coulter presents itself as a given in a way that is easily deniable and troubling; Coulter fails to make the case that the liberal values she derides are bad for the nation. The United States does not have a state religion. As a result, public schools do not teach religious doctrine in their science courses. Outside Coulter's declaration that science is a religion unto itself, she fails to articulate why science courses are so inherently bad and/or acknowledge that there are no restrictions by the government on religious teaching in churches, synagogues or mosques. Similarly, outside her declarations that abortion is bad and "infanticide" (80 - which given the definitions of infanticide, the killing of babies, and baby, an embryo that has been born - is literally untrue) she never makes a clear argument as to why having abortion be safe, legal and available upon demand is bad for the United States other than it grants women "the right to have sex with men [they] don't want to have children with . . ." (84). Coulter is a woman for whom the sexual revolution never occurred; yes, women might want to have sex without having children; Coulter never makes the case effectively in a way that does not simply degenerate into defining actions based on ". . . certain rules based on a book about faith . . ." (280). Her bible tells her so and that's fine, but why she believes the United States must conform to her view of that is never convincingly presented. She neglects the basic premise of defining what is truly so wrong about having a nation where women, gays, and non-Christians are treated with equal fundamental respect under the law and given equal opportunity in the workplace. And yes, she is unconvincing in defining what is truly so wrong about opposing the death penalty.

Instead, Godless is a collection of loosely tied, unconvincing ideas stemming from a central premise that is flawed in a way that the author credibly overcomes. And when the arguments border on becoming complex, she foregoes and sense of scholarly methodology or thousands of years of debating rules and simply degenerates into nasty remarks and weak irony.

Her argument could have been a good one; there are a lot of similarities between religious zeal and sociopolitical philosophies, but she didn't make it. Instead, she uses Godless: The Church Of Liberalism as another cheap platform to make money off her base by cloaking disingenuous attacks in the guise of meaningful discourse.

Both sides of the argument deserve better than that.

For other books by Ann Coulter, please check out m reviews of:
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)
Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism
Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right
High Crimes And Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton

1/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts.  May not be reprinted without permission.



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An Even More Convoluted Argument Makes Treason By Ann Coulter Another Book To Skip

The Good: There are end notes citing her sources
The Bad: Intellectually sloppy, Broad generalizations, Factual errors, Not witty, funny and seldom interesting
The Basics: Any hope Ann Coulter had of making a cognizant or convincing argument of liberal ineptitude and conservative heroism in dealing with Communism is gutted by her omission/distortion of facts in Treason.


The more I read of Ann Coulter’s works and the more I write about them, the more I feel like my reviews are becoming repetitive. I mean, there are only so many times one may write "intellectually dishonest," "logical fallacy," and/or "disingenuous" in the space of a week and still feel any passion behind it. So, I'm going to avoid becoming too repetitive in my reviews by beginning my review of Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism (henceforth simply referred to as Treason) by acknowledging three things:

1. The reason I find myself repeating myself in my reviews of different work by Ann Coulter is that she repeats many of the same arguments, makes many of the same mistakes and utilizes many of the same logical fallacies (errors in debating tactics) throughout her various books. Indeed, the high point of Treason for me had to be finishing the book and realizing that while Coulter had referenced Senator Edward Kennedy in four places, she had not called him a drunkard or referenced the death she attributes to him as a result of drunk driving. There are some small miracles here.

2. After reading so many works of Ann Coulter in such a short span of time, I've begun to have a recurring daydream (it's a moneymaking scheme actually) where I have a talk show with Ann Coulter and I'm paid $100 every time she commits an ad hominem attack (that's simple name calling, attacking the person making a point instead of the point they are making) on anyone. By the end of my first week of this fantasy talk show, I'm completely solvent with all my creditors and pretty much set for life. One of Coulter's most severe problems is that even in a book like Treason where she is attempting to apply a thesis to United States history, she cannot seem to resist such puerile tactics as ad hominem. It ought to be beneath her, it ought to be something conservatives shy away from Coulter for; they deserve better and they do not get it in her hands.

3. I'm beginning to find Ann Coulter funny. Seriously, if you read enough of her works and truly get her written voice in your head, it's hard not to laugh at what you're reading on the page. Honestly, sometimes, when something is so monolithic and all-encompassing, it has to make one laugh because otherwise one ends up just hating everyone and everything.

Let me explain.

Treason is a new take on the history of the United States from the end of World War II through 2003 when the book was published. The thesis of the text is simple enough and made explicit by Ann Coulter in the opening lines of the book when she writes, "Liberals has a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position" (1). Neglecting for a moment that America as a nation has never established a firm position one way or another on Scrabble for one to take an anti-American position on it, Coulter's use of tremendous generalizations like that plague the entire book. Liberals are always the enemy, they are always anti-American and they are always wrong in Coulter's explicit world view as laid out in Treason.

And what do we have to back this up? Coulter's word. The opening paragraph of Treason continues with Coulter declaring "Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't" (1). Well argued, Ann. It's hard not to sit down to Treason and find oneself thoroughly turned around. After all, if Ann Coulter declares that everyone says or does something, it must be true. And Coulter's take on liberals is so brazenly grand in its scale one feels they must acknowledge instantly that she is absolutely right.

The problems - begun here on the very first pages of Treason - are that Coulter never establishes what makes a liberal, what constitutes an "American" position, what constitutes treason (her definition seems to be a pretty loose concept of anything she deems un-American) and what makes a patriot. Coulter's definition of liberal seems to be synonymous with Democrat and the troubling extension of this is that she appears to define the power of liberals as that of the President of the United States of any given time (except when it is liberals interfering with Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan).

More troubling is Coulter's lack of definition of what makes a position American or not. Coulter makes disturbingly broad statements that are factually suspect because she seems to equate patriotism with war, like when she discusses the lead-up to the war in Iraq by saying, ". . . liberals were constantly admitting that it was the Democratic position to root against America" (224). This is one of Coulter's many, many uncited assertions throughout Treason. Democrats were opposing the war resolution, which Coulter discusses in depth in the paragraph that precedes that. In her methodology, opposing war is being anti-American and that is a leap of logic that is pretty much an intellectual long jump record. Not wanting to rush into a war, regardless of political ideology, is hardly un-American; it's responsible. Even George W. Bush believes that or else he wouldn't have asserted on many occasions leading up to the war in Iraq that all other options had been exhausted. Coulter wants it both ways, her heroic version of George Bush overcoming the obstructionist footdraggers without acknowledging the fundamental reasonability of others asking "Are we sure?" when Bush declares "we have to strike now." (That's not a direct quote).

But that's leaping to pretty much the end of Treason. Treason is a lopsided view of history of the last sixty years that blames Democratic presidents for the rise of Communism, the failure of their containment policy, and the failure to stop it from spreading within the United States. This vision is pitted against the patriotic efforts of Republican presidents and Senators who root out and destroy Communism at home and abroad. As a result, Coulter engages in any number of logical fallacies as she explores history from the end of World War II through the beginning of the War In Iraq.

But the more I read into Coulter's Treason and its take on liberal apologists for Communism, her adolations of Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and of the many lies liberals tell about conservatives and Republicans in regard to this history, I began to wonder why Coulter did not start at the beginning. Karl Marx is mentioned in passing on two occasions, The Communist Manifesto is absent from the text altogether, and there is absolutely no differentiation made between Communism and Stalinism. This allows Coulter to ask if, in relation to Communists "Aren't the dreams of murderous dictators, gulags, and death camps at least comparable in evil to segregated lunch counters" (193)? Coulter, like many high school student (I know, I've taught many of them!) is confusing Communism, which is an economic system, with totalitarian dictatorship, which is a political system. Communists in the United States and in many other parts of the world abhorred Soviet dictatorship while still supporting the principles of Communism. Communism, according to Marx and Engel (who do not appear in Treason), is what capitalism evolves into; there is no correlation in Communism with military dictatorship. The only correlation has been in the practical application of it in many of the places in the world that never had an overbearing capitalist system to evolve into Communism (in other words, Communism was a forced change there).

And this led me to wonder why Coulter's history starts where it does, with World War II. For sure, she blames Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for Russia falling to the Communists and becoming the Soviet Union and is forced to acknowledge that Republican president Coolidge let the Soviet Union expand (155) - interestingly in Coulter's version of history, the Soviet Union did nothing during the brief Harding presidency. But for all of her praise of the military force used against the Communists around the world Coulter fails to address the biggest failure of a Republican president in her own criteria of might-makes-right and force-ended-Communism argument:

A Republican was president when Lenin died.

Lenin died and the Soviet Union was in political chaos as he left no distinct successor. The result was a political freefall until Stalin seized control. The point here - and one that Coulter never deigns to address - is that the Soviet Union was never in a weaker position than when Lenin died and if Communism was as all-encompassingly evil as Coulter claims that it was (and evidently was from its very inception) and military might was truly the patriotic way to combat this evil, then it was a Republican president who dropped the ball.

As a result of her simply neglecting arguments that inconveniently refute the truths she purports - like liberals being weak and indecisive in the face of warmongering and the Communist threat - Coulter undermines her whole argument's credibility. So, too, does she undermine her credibility with statements that are simply not true. While Treason is riddled with them, my favorite comes on page 211 when in discussing the build up to war in Iraq, Coulter declares, "The idea that America would be transgressing the laws of man and God by invading Iraq - unless and until Saddam nukes Manhattan - was absurd" (211). Well, actually, on the "laws of man" part, Coulter's adherence to her literal interpretation of the Constitution has to be questioned; after all in the Constitution when a treaty is ratified, it becomes the law of the land, and the U.S. ratified the U.N. charter which has very specific rules for beginning a war. And under those rules, invading Iraq would be illegal. As for the God part, and this is why this quote is my favorite, Coulter backs herself into a position that forces her to either contradict herself or make a mockery of her perceptions of the use of the U.S. military. In the closing pages to one of her later books, Godless, she declares that the Bible is an absolute document, that it is not a living document and that the strength of her faith comes from being bound to rules that do not change. Well, one of those rules is "Thou shalt not kill." That's an absolute, it's one of the big ten. Now, Coulter either needs to accept that an invasion of Iraq would have likely transgressed that law of God's or convince her readers that she had a good faith belief that if the United States military invaded Iraq, there would be no deaths as a result.

It's hard not to snicker at that, but Coulter puts the argument out there. For the record, there is a wonderful bit in the documentary The Crusades on how Pope Urban X convinced the honorable Christians who would not fight and begin the wars that became the Crusades that what God meant by "Thou shalt not kill" was that it applied only to other Christians. But then, that's not the Bible and if the Bible is not a living document and its words are absolute as Coulter has declared, then her own statement is either a blatant falsehood or based on the utterly ridiculous premise that a United States military action would not involve death. Either way, it is one of many, many easy-to-spot factual errors throughout the book.

And beyond that, Coulter degenerates into her most profoundly immature ad hominem attacks in any of her works. On page 205, she refers to Al Gore as "Al Bore," which one suspects must make her scholarly conservative readers looking for an interesting case against liberals just shudder. Coulter's name-calling and modifying objective statements with editorializing and biased phrases guts her credibility and clouds her case (her description of Jimmy Carter on page 15 is particularly unscholarly).

So too does her neglect of another significant thing: after deriding Liberals for their policies of containment and their flirtations with Communism, Coulter brushes off the most significant pre-Reagan concession to Communism the United States made. Coulter repeatedly notes that "Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover refused to recognize the Soviet regime (though Franklin Roosevelt's very first diplomatic act as president was to grant the USSR diplomatic recognition . . .)" (51). She seems particularly disgusted by Roosevelt acknowledging the Soviet Union's existence, repeating it throughout the book - like on page 155 - as if acknowledging the USSR somehow made it more real. But after half the text of Coulter complaining about the weak Democratic president who acknowledged the USSR, there's a scant mention that "Nixon imposed wage and price controls, established relations with Communist China, engaged in detente with the Soviet Union . . ." (197). It's such a non-issue that a Republican president is acknowledging the most populous Communist nation on Earth that Coulter sandwiches it in between two other points! Like Nixon, Carter engaged the USSR in detente - and produced measurable results like the beginnings of nuclear disarmament - yet that policy when Carter practices it makes him a "failure" (139). This double standard is something that will trouble readers who are looking for a coherent argument that is well made and well cited.

As yet another example of the bias that riddles Treason, there is something particularly grating about Coulter's references to the Iranian hostage crisis at the end of Jimmy Carter's term. This is one of the many events she cites as being a black mark against the liberals, but with this, like many other parts of the book, she fails to acknowledge significant aspects of the event. She does not, for example even note that while the American hostages were held for 444 days, they all were returned home alive; Carter's diplomacy worked. And while she attributes the release of the final hostages on the day of Reagan's inauguration, she refuses to acknowledge that it was Carter's efforts that secured their release (not some magic Reagan action - he was off getting inaugurated!). Carter, by the way, details those final hours meticulously in his memoirs Keeping Faith (reviewed here!).

This work does have citations, but they are few and far between and almost none of them are associated with her most venomous commentary, which pervades the 292 pages of text. There are conservative voices that make strong, articulate arguments about the failures of our nation in dealing with threats like Communism, but none of them are as monolithic as Ann Coulter is in Treason. These are complex issues and they are nuanced and the collapse of Communism was a process spanning both Republican and Democratic Presidential Administrations and Congresses. It's not as simple as Coulter wants to make it seem.

But if she did, one wonders why she declares Reagan the great victor in vanquishing Soviet Communism and never mentions the efforts of Congressman Charlie Wilson (now immortalized in the based-on-true-events film Charlie Wilson's War, reviewed here!). Oh yeah, he was a Democrat.

It's unfortunate when the argument is buggered by those pesky facts.

For other books by Ann Coulter, please check out m reviews of:
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)
Slander
High Crimes And Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton

1.5/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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There's Nothing Quite Like Waking Up To A Little Of Ann Coulter's Slander!

The Good: It's short, Coulter correctly and unbiasedly notes some actual instances of bias, Has footnotes.
The Bad: Not at all balanced, Riddled with logical fallacies, Does not convincingly prove her thesis.
The Basics: Ann Coulter's Slander presents a poorly-argued case riddled with omissions, generalizations and simple name-calling that make it a poor choice of reading for the educated conservative exploring media bias.


Today's book review of one of the works of Ann Coulter is a timed event. Having finished reading her entire library of bestsellers, I am making my challenge in the Intellectual Olympics today a timed event. The novelty of probably being referenced by Coulter in her work, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (reviewed here!) for my review of her first work, High Crimes And Misdemeanors has long since worn off. That inspiration to read the volumes in between has led to many frustrated hours of reading poorly-written arguments written with ad hominem attacks, blatant omissions and biased characterizations to frame arguments within a narrow context that is seldom adhered to by Coulter, which has led to many hours of frustrated reviews where I've come to feel repetitive and bland. It is my hope that when I finish this review of Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right that I shall be able to sleep tonight without dreaming of a talk show I share with Ann Coulter where I am paid based on her failure to follow the established rules of debate. In other words, I've spent enough time on Ann Coulter the last few days, I want to be able to move on.

The purpose of any review is to help a reader make a decision about whether or not to purchase something. Our job as reviewers is to objectively evaluate objects and experiences to either inspire people to pick something up or leave it on the shelf. It's pretty easy to get liberals to leave Ann Coulter's works on the shelf; despite the strong desire by many liberals to know what is going on in the mindset and Zeitgeist of the American conservatives, many have been offended by Coulter's attitude and public statements at various times. Liberals who have read her works are often left disappointed by their extreme bias to the point of intellectual disingenuity. To liberals who are thinking of picking up Slander, you can pretty much figure how this one is going in terms of respectable debate by the subtitle "Liberal Lies . . ." But for conservatives, there is a strong temptation to pick up a book like Slander in order to get the arguments to confront the intellectual adversary when one engages in debate with them. To conservatives who are looking to debate on matters of media bias, Slander will not be the best tool possible to do that.

Allow me to explain.

Ann Coulter quickly establishes the purpose of Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right with the zeal of a debator ready to make her case that in relation to the media in the United States, "Political 'debate' in this country is insufferable. . . [and] It's all liberals' fault . . . the public square is wall-to-wall liberal propaganda" (1 - 2). The problem Coulter runs into right off the bat is that she is not living in an unfree society; there are conservative news outlets - including Coulter and Slander - and they are alive and flourishing. It only takes sixty pages for Coulter to contradict herself on this point with the first mention of Fox News, when she notes, "Outside of Fox News, the 'from the right' seat on Crossfire is one of the rare paid positions available for conservatives on TV" (60).

Conservatives considering picking up Slander and utilizing it and its arguments for debate need to understand that the fundamental problem Ann Coulter has is not that conservatives do not have media outlets, it is that by her standards they do not have enough. Coulter's argument is an explicit argument that liberals dominate the media and an implicit one that conservatives need to fight back and expose this bias and get a conservative viewpoint out.

Most conservatives reading that will realize right off the bat what the problem is: news media in the United States ought to be presenting facts, indisputable, unbiased representations of actual events as they occur. It is the job and purpose of the free press in the United States to disseminate information, not ideas. The dissemination of ideas, no matter how benign the idea, is propaganda. Coulter's book Slander is one brief - only 205 pages before the end note citations and the index bring it up to 256 pages - argument that the problem with the American media is that it has a liberal bias and disseminates news in a way that spreads liberal propaganda and that the solution is to expose the liberal domination in order to replace it with a conservative viewpoint.

The combination of the two aspects makes the book a poor work to use to attack the institutions of the media because Coulter so closely ties the problems she sees with the implicit agenda that she is promoting. Over the course of the ten chapters, Coulter explores what she sees as the wide-ranging media bias, the psychology of creating that bias, what conservatives are doing to combat that and exploring how a conservative presence would radically alter the national debate.

The problems with Slander, then come in Coulter first declaring that there is an insurmountable liberal bias and then implying that the fix is to eliminate the bias and give conservatives a free and fair voice. Essentially, those two things are what Slander is all about.

In order to establish that liberals - and Coulter begins her argument by utilizing the flawed correlation that "liberal" and "Democrat" are interchangeable. Most true liberals today - the few who are unashamed to call themselves liberal - tend to squirm at the thought of the far-too-moderate Democrats and their acquiescence to many reactionary policies created in the past few years. Similarly, Democrats - as embodied by the national Democratic Party- have systematically eliminated their liberal trappings in order to move to the center in the vain attempt to win presidential and congressional elections. Liberal and Democrat are not interchangeable, except in the biased, narrow worldview that makes such arguments as the vast liberal bias in the media even possible.

Coulter's argument is based on omissions, broad generalizations, unsupported statements that are presented as facts and an tendency to resort to churlish name-calling as opposed to maintaining an air of intellectualism and honest debate. Because it comes up so quickly in Slander, I shall start with the problematic ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy (problem with establishing an argument in debate) wherein the person making an argument abandons the argument to attack their opposition instead of attacking their position. It is ironic that in the very same page that Coulter brazenly declares that "Prevarication and denigration are the hallmarks of liberal argument. Logic is not their metier. Blind religious faith is" (2) that she commits her first ad hominem attack by stating, "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 day's purveyor of hate" (2). It took two pages for Coulter to abandon serious intellectual debate and simply start insulting her opposition. Coulter carried through the Slander a tendency to simply insult those who do not agree with her, including moderate Republicans - on page 50 she refers to Jim Jeffords as a "half-wit." And like most of the Ann Coulter library, she continues - or given that I've read her works backwards from the current work back to Slander, establishes - to reference Edward Kennedy and the drunk driving death associated with him at almost any opportunity, whether it is relevant or not. This does no service to conservatives.

Omissions plague Slander as well. Keeping in mind that the book came out in 2002, a year when President George W. Bush's approval rating was high, Republicans controlled the House of Representatives and the Presidency and the Supreme Court was staffed by a majority of conservatives. Coulter fails to mention that the party she most supports is the one in power and she writes as if conservatives are constantly under siege. So, for example, in establishing her idea of "wall-to-wall liberal propaganda," Coulter references the popularity of news programs on CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and Time Magazine - never mentioning that Time is generally considered a center-right publication. She even quotes Time's Jack White on page 58 who suggests that there is a right bias in the American media! But the omission aspect here is troubling. Coulter's worldview for the "wall-to-wall" liberal bias in the media is supported by citing four news outlets in a market of hundreds. Of course she does not mention the viewership of Fox News; it's not a small percentage of the population! In other words, acknowledging how many people watch Fox News undermines Coulter's assertion that the United States is all liberal news programming, all the time. Such omissions do no service to the argument or the conservatives who rely on Coulter to make a coherent and clean argument.

Coulter also makes a number of statements that are broad ranging and yet are utterly unsupported by any facts. In addition to referring to news reported by "liberal" sources, Coulter frequently uses the words "lie," "lies," and "liars" without actually proving that the statements made are actually lies. She substitutes her opportunities to elaborate on what she perceives as lies to simply spread her own propaganda, like when she states, "Republicans may resent the fact that unions give so much money to Democrats, but they don't hate the worker. Who would be more likely to have a beer with a trucker: Tom DeLay or Barbara Boxer? Democrats actually hate working-class people" (31). That last sentence is the type of remark Coulter makes consistently that assumes facts not in evidence. Indeed, it's a pretty easy assertion to contradict, especially if one wants to apply greed as the only motive for relationships. But the middle sentence is one that actually made me curious. Who would be more likely to have a beer with a trucker: Tom DeLay or Barbara Boxer? What kind of objective testing did Coulter actually do to make her implied argument that conservative Tom Delay would be more likely to have beer with a trucker? There's no evidence that she did, just like she presents no evidence that Boxer has not had a beer with a trucker or that DeLay has (the cynic in me says that as white upper class folk neither would be more or less likely to voluntarily, randomly have a beer with a working-class person, save during an election year, but I have absolutely no facts supporting that and that it might be worthwhile to note here that many working-class people assume a prejudice - i.e. "they don't want to have a beer with the likes of me" - on behalf of the wealthy and would not even ask them to have a drink with them). This sort of statement that implies that conservative politicians and conservatives in general are fundamentally different and somehow better than their liberal counterparts is prevalent through much of Slander and it does not service to the conservatives to have them cite such statements as facts when they lack any backing.

Slander, then becomes Coulter railing against what she perceives as the liberal media and arguing that somehow the conservatives would do better. She undermines her own point up until the very last lines where she states, "Conservatives already know that people they disagree with politically can be 'charming.' Also savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans and lie for sport" (205). This is the sum total of her reason for believing conservatives ought to run the media and it pretty effectively illustrates how Coulter undermines her own argument as a proudly conservative commentator. She does no service to conservatives here!

I wanted to close by quickly noting something of significance here. There are very few openly liberal publications, all of which are news commentary publications (whatwith news reporting publications always declaring they are unbiased) and it is disappointing that Coulter does not address this with more academic curiosity and professionalism. The openly-liberal The Nation is mentioned only twice in Slander and then one of the two mentions is simply a citation from it. Magazines like The Nation, which is almost constantly begging its readers for contributions just to stay afloat, have vastly lower circulation (and presumably readership) than Fox News has viewers. At least The Nation is honest about its place in American discourse, not claiming to be "fair and balanced" as Fox News does.

In establishing her case, Coulter wisely notes that "When arguments are premised on lies, there is no foundation for debate" (3). On this we may agree. The problem is that it does not matter whose lies one uses to create the foundation for a debate - liberal or conservative - if the foundation of an argument utilizes untruths either by transmission or omission, the premise and debate that follows is flawed. Ann Coulter's Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right does conservatives no favors in that regard as she undermines the side she seeks to save by rolling in the same brand of muck she accuses her opposition of throwing.

For other books by Ann Coulter, please check out m reviews of:
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)
High Crimes And Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton

3/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here.

© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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Ann Coulter's Latest, Guilty Suggests This Hatemonger Is Running Out Of Steam!

The Good: It is short.
The Bad: Largely made up of pointless namecalling, Factually suspect, Shaky logic, Underdeveloped, Not funny or witty.
The Basics: Ann Coulter's latest argument, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America, hypocritically asserts that liberals are whiners and phony victims while attempting to argue that conservatives are the real victims.


Unlike Ann Coulter, I shall open my review by taking a moment to define "liberal." "Liberals" are those who fight for the freedom and ability for self-determination of all people, not just the ones we agree with. That simple act, even taking a stab at defining what makes a liberal a "liberal" is more than Ann Coulter does in her new novel, er, political discourse entitled Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America. As a true liberal, I do not contest Ann Coulter's right to write such a book, her publisher for publishing it or the right of any of her legion of fans to purchase and read it. I do, however, deny that she is a remotely worthwhile writer, illustrates any ability in this latest work to make a salient point and that she has developed at all into anything resembling a better defender of her side's views and values since her last book. If anything, Guilty seems to have Coulter well over the shark she jumped; at only two hundred sixty-four well-spaced pages plus an additional forty-seven pages of citations and indexes this is one of her thinner books.

And as a liberal, it is worth noting that I have read Coulter's other works, so I can say with some authority that she has not grown in terms of style, form or ability in any noticeable way. I'm not saying that because as yet she and her staff have not confirmed the reference to me in If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans. Side note: If you want to meet a bunch of VERY friendly people, go register at the Ann Coulter website and ask non-leading questions about sources! Coulter has fans who make her look levelheaded, kind and intellectual. Regardless, I figure there are very few Star Trek collectibles dealers who are also critiquing Ann Coulter's works on the internet, so I feel pretty secure in assuming she was alluding to me in her forward to that prior book.

Moving on to Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America, Coulter's premise is remarkably simple: liberals have created a culture of victimhood and that to be successful as a liberal one needs to declare themselves a victim. These fake victims, Coulter posits, are not real victims and just out for attention. Her arguments throughout the book almost always - rather ironically - decry those who declare themselves victims, then attempts to argue that liberal victims are not victims, but the Republicans and conservatives are legitimate victims ("To find the most authentic victims . . . one can simply refer to the people the mainstream media urge us to hate, beasts such as George Bush. . . Joe McCarthy, Jesse Helms, . . . and Sarah Palin" on page 2). After that, she brazenly declares that groups like "the poor" are not truly victims. This is a tough argument to make when one is starving and the Federal funding for social programs like getting food to them is diverted to things like killing people overseas. One suspects that the Michigan autoworker who clocked in to work each day and lost their job while the CEO of their company flew to Washington in a private jet to ask for money after cashing exceptional year-end bonuses has a right to feel like they have been victimized; the social contract they were a part of has clearly failed them.

The irony is that, yet again, Coulter dishes out what she accuses the other side of doing to conservatives, when she summarizes "These counterfeit victims are so full of their own self-righteousness, they believe they can do anything, lie shamelessly, commit wanton violence, steal from their neighbors, and claim they were acting out of some bizarre sense of self-defense" (264). The thing is, Coulter is doing all of these things in Guilty and moreover, she neglects the real problems of how the Bush Administration had been self-righteous, monomaniacal, violent liars (save Scott McClellen, whom she does mention) who plundered the national treasuries for their own purposes.

But to stick to Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America, perhaps the best example of Coulter's hypocrisy is in her own inability to follow her own rules. So, for example, she derides Bill Clinton (a popular target for her as ever) by noting Clinton's anger from an interview "This was a decade after Ken Starr wrapped up his investigation and eight years after Clinton was out of office, but Clinton was still babbling about Starr in moments of stress" (244). To clarify, Coulter is kvetching about Clinton bringing up old issues. This, despite the fact that Coulter references Clinton - usually in derogatory terms - the same eight years after Clinton is no longer in officer on sixty-one pages of the book, which is on par with George Bush (also sixty-one) and more than Sarah Palin (thirty-five), John McCain (twenty-five). The only person more referenced in this book - again usually in smug and demeaning ways - is Barack Obama, who has eighty pages that make reference to him. The point of this, of course, is to illustrate that Ann Coulter's arguments are often hypocritical in nature; arguing that people like former President Clinton have little right to bring up issues in regard to attacks made upon him after so much time while devoting quite a bit of space to making attacks against Bill Clinton.

This is largely how Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America reads, though. Liberals are classified as "victims" who are actually victimizing conservatives. Arguably, conservatives are being attacked; by Coulter herself. For example, in describing Scott McClellan's tell-all on the Bush White House, Coulter notes "The media accuse Republicans of playing dirty pool, but they turn to the retarded press secretary for an attack on his former boss" (118). In addition to fine ad hominem attacks like "retarded" for the conservative McClellen, Coulter makes broad statements that have no bearing on reality. When McClellen wrote his tell-all on the Bush Administration, liberals (real liberals, not Coulter's broad-based term for anyone she does not like) did not believe him any more than they did when he was press secretary. Coulter makes out that liberals are self-serving dimwits who will change their minds about a person based upon political expediency, like suddenly embracing liars who have lied to them for years. Liberals did not fall for this ploy any more than women rushed to vote for Sarah Palin en masse under some misguided notion that just because she was a woman she represented core women's rights issues.

Like all of Coulter's books, this volume is packed with ad hominem attacks that detract from anything resembling a legitimate point Coulter might be trying to make. She likens liberal journalists to Nazis (165), the media is decried as "deceptive" (212), and political assassins are regarded as liberals or "random nuts" (258). Liberals are "losers" (113), single mothers are referenced as "future strippers" (36) and such blatant disregard for the rules of debate prevent Coulter from making any points that legitimately stick. Liberals are liars, not to be trusted and phony victims in Coulter's worldview, while their Republican counterparts are only wrong when they leave the party.

As well, when it suits Coulter's purposes, she simply mentions facts, but then ignores the implications of them. So, for example, she properly references that the Council Of Conservative Citizens has a history of directors who were white supremacists, but then she denies that the organization still stands for such values. This is rather baffling in sentences that contradict themselves like "There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation, though its 'Statement of Principles' offers that the organization opposes 'forced integration' and 'efforts to mix the races of mankind'" (24). Yes, the problem is not the forced integration, but resisting mixing "races" is pretty much the definition of segregation. But who cares about facts when they are so inconvenient anyway? Similarly, on 165 and 166, she decries how the "liberal" media addressed Allen using the racist term "macaca" without actually addressing the fact that the term is a pejorative. Instead, she essentially writes the comment off because it went over the heads of the audience - ". . . Allen had called the liberal pill [again, ad hominem] a 'monkey' in a foreign language, which no one in his audience would have understood . . ." (167). Apparently, it's all right to be racist or sexist so long as your audience is too stupid to understand that you are being racist or sexist. Well argued, Ann Coulter!

Moreover, Coulter makes a lot of false implications to make her points. For example, after describing the mainstream media as tools for the liberals (pages 14 - 18), she comments on how Fox News must be the most fair and balanced because it now has the highest viewership of any cable news network. This is a fallacious argument, even by her own standards; if Fox News is truly the only "conservative" news source on cable and conservatives would only watch it for their news sources, the liberals would still be split between watching several other networks. So, of course, Fox would be huge, by Coulter's standards, half of the population would be watching one network while the other half was spread among about eight other news stations! And, as always, Coulter trots out Alan Colmes as evidence of Fox's fair and balanced perspective (page 15), though I've yet to meet a single liberal who considers Colmes liberal.

But moreover, Coulter's tone is tiresome and she creates the very sense of victimization she decries in the "liberals" when she writes things like "Our incompetent press secretaries go bad, theirs never do. The weakest of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices always go bad; Democrat-appointed justices never do. Our soporific pundits go bad; theirs appear regularly on Larry King Live" (113). It is hard to see why the liberals are so bad when even Coulter paints the worst of them as having more integrity than the worst of the conservatives. It is because of arguments like this that Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America seems far more sloppy than actually possessing anything akin to wit.

Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America explores the premise of "victims" in the media, single mothers, the Republican Attack Machine (which Coulter denies flatly exists), media and Republicans. Published in January 2009, arguably finished before Barack Obama won the election, Coulter's writing is an attempt to reinvigorate fear and division in the populace when one might easily argue that the election of Barack Obama was the triumph of hope politics over fear. Littered with factual errors that are troubling - "Lewis Libby was the only perpetrator Bush likely had ever met . . ." (185) despite Libby implicating Dick Cheney - makes it difficult to take Coulter's arguments seriously.

As well, Coulter makes herself into a troubling authority on matters which she does not have any training or experience. So, for example, in discussing Terri Schiavo, Coulter writes "It was not true that Terri was on 'life support' - anymore than a child up to about age four is on 'life support' because he needs help to eat" (212). This, despite both medical experts declaring otherwise and there being a legal definition for "life support." Much of Coulter's Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America boils down to "this is fact because I say it is" without much (or anything) to back it up.

For liberals, the solution is easy: don't buy the book, do not read it and do not succumb to Coulter's talk that we or they are all trying (or are actually) victims. No liberal is missing out on a relevant and powerful voice in the debate by not incorporating the voice of Ann Coulter (stick to the well-argued conservative positions for ammunition in debate!). For conservatives, by all means, read Ann Coulter's latest work and then improve upon it. There are plenty of educated, well-reasoned conservatives that might be able to take the kernel of argument Coulter introduces and run with it to make it into an articulate, thoughtful debate. Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America is not that argument and Ann Coulter is not the a-team mind needed to make it, at least not in this volume.

For other books by Ann Coulter, please check out my reviews of:
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)
High Crimes And Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton

0/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2010, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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Ann Coulter's How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must): Kicking At The Fallen.

The Good: One or two amusing lines, An occasional salient point
The Bad: Lack of citations, Hypocritical and contradictory arguing strategies, Riddled with logical fallacies, Lacks insight/depth
The Basics: With How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) Ann Coulter returns to political commentary with a collection of columns weakly held together by beliefs she contradicts frequently.


I suppose if you live under siege long enough, you come to see the world through the perpetually narrow view from between your legs in your duck and cover position in the corner of your bomb shelter. After all, it is not an uncommon thing to read stories of people who lived through the Great Depression who never stopped using coupons or would continue to honor the Meatless Tuesdays long after such provisioning had ended. I write this at the beginning of my review of Ann Coulter's collection of columns and essays entitled How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) because in reading it, I often found myself baffled by the defensive/offensive posture to it.

The introduction to How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must), which contains the eighteen pages of exclusive thoughts and writings only found in this book of largely reprinted material is a invocation to Coulter's conservative readers to cast off their fear of the liberals and fight back. Her stated goal of the book is to ". . . explain how to argue with liberals by example, not exegesis. But there are some useful pointers. . . First, don't surrender out of the gate. This is a highly controversial approach among Republican politicians, obviously - otherwise we wouldn't already have a bipartisan consensus . . ." (9) and when I read the book and considered the mentality of the new writing bridging together and introducing the columns, the tone was of one who was writing from a siege mentality. Coulter is exorting the conservatives to not be afraid of liberals and to fight them in any way possible (she gives ten suggestions for how to do this most effectively) and to take back the heart and soul of American politics and social discourse. I began to think about this more and more as I read the book because something did not sit quite right about the tone of the book and I looked again at the copyright date. This book was published in 2004, before the election.

And it hit me; Coulter is demanding that conservatives rise up and cast off the shackles of liberal oppression of them at a time when Republicans - many, if not a solid majority, of them conservative Republicans - controlled the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the Presidency and were neck and neck in the Senate (2004 would see it swing back to the Republicans) and had more Governors than the Democrats. So when the Republicans had the lion's share of the political power in the United States, Ann Coulter was trying to rally the conservative troops to try to get them on equal footing. As I continued through the book, it became clear through the many ad hominem attacks, the consistent generalizations and the declarations of what liberals believe (which would more properly be labeled as what Ann Coulter believes liberals believe, as most of her statements grossly distort the stated and actionable goals and values of American liberals) in the most biased terms possible and the references to uncited events and sources, that this was not a rallying cry for conservatives to empower themselves. It's all about kicking the opposition when they're down.

The irony is this: Ann Coulter clearly defines what she sees as the intellectual villainy of liberals - she opens the book with a convenient list - but then she does in her writing exactly what she says makes liberals so heinous! From her smirking visage on the front cover, one might imply that she had some secret knowledge to impart or a tremendous methodology that would inspire conservatives to foil the liberals, but instead her writings adopt a terrible sense of "if you can't beat them, be badder than them!"

After complaining about Hollywood's presentation of liberals as heroic - I'm sure if a movie production company thought there were millions to be made in a film where Robert Redford as a President of the United States stood up to make a speech about the importance of keeping homosexuals from marrying and kicking the lazy poor people off welfare and letting them starve and die or a movie where Jude Law as president rises to sway the Senate over an important vote that will do away with Social Security or finally pass an anti-flag burning Amendment to the Constitution they would be on that action in a heartbeat (NOTE TO ANN COULTER: If you wish to invest some of the wealth you've made in books attacking liberals in a film like that, I would only be too happy to make it on your dime!) - Coulter goes into ten rules that she believes will allow conservatives to talk to liberals in order to win their arguments, if not treating them like fellow human beings. Because the book How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) - which is further subtitled "The World According To Ann Coulter" on the cover and title page - is intended to follow these rules to bind her collection of columns together as a cohesive book, it is worth studying them in order to see how she applies them to her premise, which is that liberals are on the wrong side of leading the country in regards to the War on Terror, not supporting racial profiling for Arabs traveling by airplane, John Kerry's candidacy, environmentalism, use of congressional power, Christianity in the government-sponsored buildings and programs, the South and its post-Civil War legacy, the news media, Max Cleland, crime policy, Bill Clinton's memoirs, Elian Gonzalas, and gun regulation (despite the fact that the Democrats and liberals were out of effective power for the majority of these articles). As well, Coulter rails against the two sets of standards for liberals as opposed to conservatives.

This is an book that deeply believes that Democrats create a double standard, applying one standard to themselves and one standard for Republicans. Coulter states this explicitly on the inside front jacket to the book (it's in the book, too, but after half an hour of skimming to try to refind it in there, it seemed like it was time to move on with the review) when she declares that being liberal means, "The absolute conviction that there is one set of rules for you, and another, completely different set of rules for everyone else." This book is, in many ways, a study of the irony of underdeveloped arguments as Coulter declares that "If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you said . . . In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next so you can never nail them" (3). Investigating her pointers on how to talk to liberals and comparing it with the rest of the text, we discover that Coulter applies that same sense to her own view of conservatism; she creates rules of behavior, then does not follow them and rails against the faults of liberals and then uses the same flawed logic she accuses her opposition of using. Coulter undermines the principles of her arguments by contradicting herself frequently.

Coulter's rules - and the way she applies them are laid out in the book thus:

1. ". . . Don't surrender out of the gate" (9). This is a good rule that serves debators and legislators well, the idea that if you start out by compromising, you're liable to appear weak and not get what you want. Coulter applies this to the conservatives constantly throughout the book, vigorously defending the initial actions and instincts of conservatives like George W. Bush, Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond. She wants conservatives to fight. Yet, she expects that liberals will not behave the same way. In her column from November 10, 2000 on what she declares as "Day 2 of America Held Hostage" she complains that in regards to Gore not conceding the election, "The Democrats have declared war" (283). So, Coulter wants conservatives to stand up and fight, but liberals not to, that sounds an awful lot like one set of rules for one side and a completely different set of rules for the other.

2. "Don't be defensive" (10). This rule would be a good one for conservatives if they truly were under siege in the United States instead of being the party that controls every major branch of government (Coulter manages to neglect throughout her book that even though Clinton was president, the Supreme Court that served parallel to him was conservative and for the majority of Clinton's tenure, Republicans controlled the House and then the Senate as well). As a result, Coulter pins many of the evils of liberalism on Bill Clinton (personally), most obviously deriding him for his failures to prevent the September 11, 2001 attacks. Despite the fact that only Congress can declare war and the Republicans controlled Congress for six of the eight years of the Clinton presidency Coulter rails on Clinton's inactions in reacting with military force (pages 21 - 22) with the refrain "Clinton did nothing." The problem with this rule is this; you cannot credibly claim you and your views are under siege constantly AND not defend against attacks by them. In physical combat, this would be as ludicrous as letting your opponents stab you while you reacted solely by stabbing them back. And it is rings as a disingenuous rule when Coulter does apply it, as when she writes "In early 1991, Bush [the first president Bush] went to war with Iraq the way liberals like . . . Still a majority of Democrats opposed the war. Democrats demanded that our troops stop at Baghdad, but then after 9/11, absurdly complained that Bush didn't 'finish off the job' with Saddam" (21). She violates her own rule here (and throughout the book!) and acts defensively. But this quote is exceptional for exploring how Coulter portrays her icons favorably while her opposition is monolithically treated as abusive and wrong; note that it is BUSH who went to war, but Democrats who ended it. Again you can't credibly say that Congress both started and ended the conflict within its Constitutional mandates, so Coulter doesn't; she biases it with the heroism of being a warrior against the perceived cowardice of being a peacemaker. Then again, Coulter had already illustrated that you can't be defensive because you can't nail a liberal whatwith their subject jumping (see quote from page 3 above); ineffectively writing off her own defensive moments, that sounds an awful lot like one set of rules for one side and a completely different set of rules for the other.

3. ". . .You must outrage the enemy" (10). This is one that I like because Coulter has made her career out of outraging liberals and yet she is almost constantly writing from a place of outrage in How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must). Outside the creating a sweeping dialectic that pits all conservatives against all liberals with statements like "Democrats are always worse" (273), Coulter frequently writes in the anger of the moment. She is a woman who has been outraged and so she feels the need to outrage. She rails against the inequities of the national dialogue as a person who is deeply offended by them, like when she writes "Trent Lott's allegedly racially insensitive toast to Strom Thurmond in late 2002 was nothing compared with Senator Chris Dodd's ostentatiously racially offensive tribute to Senator Robert Byrd less than a year and a half later" (273). And Coulter continues to be so offended by the drunk driving death that occurred at the hands of Senator Edward Kennedy twenty years prior that she feels the need to reference it at virtually every opportunity. This rule is one that seems more in keeping with "do unto others as they have done unto you," which contradicts the idea Coulter sets forth that liberals are the enemy and conservatives carry the moral high ground. Despite her own premise, Coulter is encouraging her readers to get into the dirt with "the enemy," "In other words, both Republicans and Democrats engage in mud-throwing, gutter politics . . ." (277).

4. ". . . Never apologize, at least not for what liberals want you to apologize for" (10). This one is one that I'm going to gloss over some because it is a contradictory rule based on what Coulter sees as the liberal mindset. It assumes that she knows what liberals want conservatives to apologize for. Coulter apologizes for nothing in this book and she derides both liberals and conservatives who do. But the framework of some of her arguments - developed well after an incident has ended, beg the question, "what is it Coulter wants?" Ann Coulter devoted sixteen pages to the case of Elian Gonzalez and his being returned to Cuba written well after September 11, 2001 (272), specifically deriding Janet Reno for her actions two years prior. If not to try to get an apology from Reno (or others in the Clinton Administration), what is the point of laying out an intricate argument that Reno was wrong? Does Coulter merely want to prevent Reno from ever holding a high office again? Whatever, Coulter belabors arguments throughout the book that seem to lack a purpose other than to either assert her own worldview as correct or to evoke an apology, it must be the former because the latter would clearly be establishing one set of rules for one side and a completely different set of rules for the other.

5. ". . . Never compliment a Democrat" (11). Coulter introduces this rule by pointing out that when Republicans devote time on talk shows to complimenting members of their committees, Democrats respond by addressing the issues the interviewers asked about. Because this pointer is so closely tied with rules 6 and 7, I'll forge ahead and address them together:

6. ". . . Never show graciousness to a Democrat" (12). It's worth noting here that Coulter uses "democrat" and "liberal" interchangeably, something virtually no Democrat would do (Coulter herself marvels in her texts about how Democrats try to distance themselves from the word liberal) and most true liberals would refrain from doing (being that few Democrats are truly liberal enough for them),

and 7. ". . . Never flatter a Democrat" (12). Herein she cites many efforts made by George W. Bush to court the Kennedy's only to have them not call him smart or gloss over his foibles. In other words, Coulter wants conservatives to be ungracious to Democrats because, she alleges, Democrats are universally ungracious to Republicans. Coulter makes no mention of Republicans being ungracious to Democrats, a logical fallacy as gross as her omission of even a single example of Democrats flattering Republicans; and for a woman who so frequently criticizes Bill Clinton, this is an especially egregious violation of debate fair play as Clinton has many, many statements where he flattered Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is notably absent from How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must), as is any mention of Jim Jeffords. Jeffords was a Republican Senator who became an Independent when George W. Bush excluded him from a ceremony honoring the result of his efforts in Vermont because Jeffords did not support one of the Bush initiatives. Because Jeffords did not flatter his president with unqualified support, Bush punished him; in the same way Coulter accuses Democrats of being ungracious in the face of liberal attacks. But Coulter here omits facts in evidence that contradict her arguments, like when she asserts ". . . it is not true that George Bush would have behaved like Al Gore after the 2000 election had the situation been reversed. . . . I know how conservatives would have responded if Bush had lost the election while winning the popular vote" (278) (NOTE: Coulter frequently does what she accuses liberals of doing as far with the "liberal two-step," see quote above, with phrases like this: note that she changes the subject from Bush's reaction to conservative response, two very different things!). The problem here is that Bush acted exactly like Gore before Gore acted that way. Don't believe me? Check it out - it's one of the uncommented clips in Fahrenheit 9/11 where Moore's camera simply captures what people say and do, so it's not like there's propaganda or agenda involved - when Al Gore was determined the winner in Florida and thus the probable winner of the presidential election, George W. Bush said he didn't believe it and that he was sure that they had gotten it wrong. In other words, for all her claims that Bush would have behaved graciously if Al Gore had been declared president, the truth is during the brief time Gore had been declared the victor in the 2000 election, Bush was not gracious. But then, this is forgivable because Coulter has one set of rules for one side and a completely different set of rules for the other.

8. ". . . Do not succumb to liberal bribery" (13). This is another ridiculous rule that paints the Republicans and conservatives like they are not in the position of greatest political power in the country. The simplest response to this is that Coulter's counter to liberal bribery appears to be conservative intimidation. Back the Patriot Act or else we'll make you look soft on crime, profile only Arabs in allegations of terrorism or else . . . The liberals have nothing to bribe with and it's hard to both tout the Patriot Act, Bush's tax cuts and the unflinchingly religious view of Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ AND claim that conservatives give up on too much too easily. That's just terrible debating! The logical fallacy whereby one only uses establish facts that benefit their own side while omitting all opposing viewpoints is almost as bad a ad hominem.

9. ". . . Prepare for your deepest, darkest secrets to become liberal talking points" (14). Coulter's frequent references to Edward Kennedy's drunk driving and the death related to it, the fact that she mentions Monica Lewinsky's take on page FOUR of Bill Clinton's member (yet, bizarrely contradicts the insinuation of such on page 233 with Lewinski discussing her sexual satisfaction), and brazenly declaring that John Kerry's marital history was a result of a quest for financial gain (109) illustrates her fearlessness in doing the same right back. Deriding one's opposition for exposing the personal lives of their opposition and doing the same thing is establishing one set of rules for one side and a completely different set of rules for the other.

and 10. ". . . Always be open to liberals in transition" (15). Coulter is eager to convert liberals to conservatism (there is no middle ground in her debating methodology), yet deeply critical of anyone who goes the other way. For example, she derides David Brock as a "professional former conservative" (14) illustrating her contempt for conservatives in transition, which sounds an awful lot like one set of rules for one side and a completely different set of rules for the other.

And when all else fails with not following her own principles for what the book is about by clearly establishing one set of standards for fighting liberals . . . often by behaving in the reprehensible way she accuses liberals of behaving and engaging in debate, she simply resorts to ad hominem attacks. That's name calling for those not schooled in debate. I flipped open How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) to a random page just now to see if I could find an example of a blatant insult without intellectual merit - in other words, an attack on the person, not their ideas. I opened to page 159, which opens a column on gay marriage, and I was getting a bit dismayed as I read the page; had I picked a page without an ad hominem attack? After all, Coulter carefully referred to democratic concepts of national defense as "insane ideas" (159), correctly attacking the idea, not the bearers of it. But then, she follows it up with ". . . the nut candidates who always forget to lie about their positions . . ." (159). Random page, ad hominem attack, that's one out of 344; most of the rest of the pages are like that.

Ann Coulter does no great service to conservatives or the conservative cause with How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) in that anyone who actually reads the book will discover that Coulter is not actually presenting a coherent debate, she is opining about those making the policy in dialectic terms that are often completely inaccurate in reality. Conservatives might want to rally to Coulter and have her on their team, but in reading her work where she criticizes constantly without offering concrete solutions or anything remotely balanced as far as debate goes, one finds that she is not a player, she is at best a cheerleader. Coulter's purpose with this book is to rally the (conservative) troops with venom as opposed to substance, broad generalizations as opposed to cited facts (there are no end notes in this publication) and vague ideas and insults instead of intellectual discourse worthy of attention.

In other words, How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) is a fine book, unless you understand the words in it.

For more books written by Ann Coulter and other political writers, please check out my reviews of:
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
High Crimes And Misdemeanors
Stupid White Men by Michael Moore

1/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2010, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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