Uninspiring Anthology: Suck It, Wonder Woman! Is An Unremarkable Collection!

The Good: Conversational writing style is fun, Some entertaining stories
The Bad: Not terribly original, insightful or clever, Repetitive
The Basics: Olivia Munn’s autobiographical essays and collection of philosophies, Suck It, Wonder Woman!, adds up to nothing of consequence.


I like Olivia Munn on The Newsroom (season two is now reviewed here!) and that was my impetus for picking up her book Suck It, Wonder Woman!. After my first night of reading Suck It, Wonder Woman!, my wife asked me what I thought of it and I frowned and noted that it wasn’t adding up to much. Her response was one of anything but surprise and she reminded me how much Olivia Minn rambled on the commentary track on the first season of The Newsroom (reviewed here!). I had forgotten how Munn dominated the audio track bonus feature on The Newsroom without, ultimately, saying much at all.

Outside The Newsroom, I had no experience with Olivia Munn until reading Suck It, Wonder Woman!,so I cannot offer a comparative analysis of how the book stacks up against her performances on Attack Of The Show. But, if Suck It, Wonder Woman! is any indication, Aaron Sorkin has seen a potential in Olivia Munn that is not at all evident in her writing. In other words, anyone hoping for a Sorkin-esque level of wit, depth and thematic sophistication will not find it from Olivia Munn, at least not in Suck It, Wonder Woman!. On The Newsroom, Munn is articulate and she delivers her lines entirely convincingly.

That voice is entirely absent from Suck It, Wonder Woman!

In Suck It, Wonder Woman!, Olivia Munn rambles from subject to subject; it begins as an autobiography and interspersed between stories of Munn’s life are her philosophies on various things. Her subjects of contemplations range from why one shouldn’t mix tequila and painkillers (it leads to homoerotic showers, apparently, which is not exactly the strongest argument against, despite the fact that it comes after nearly drowning) to why you should get a threesome out of the way if your boyfriend has not already had one. None of the passages are particularly insightful or authoritative, save the autobiographical bits. Munn describes her lonely childhood, early experiences in Hollywood (like meeting with a famous director who masturbated in front of her) to her rise to prominence on G4’s Attack Of The Show. Her story is hardly unique, though the story of the worst day of her life (when, during an admittedly bratty phase, she treated her grandmother poorly on the very night of her grandmother’s death) is heartbreaking and easy to empathize with.

Munn’s writing style is conversational and she repeats quite a bit of information. In Suck It, Wonder Woman!, aided by Mac Montandon, Munn writes like a high school girl talks. She writes enthusiastically, tells her stories in a rambling manner with little points and the stories are easy to read and get through. So, for example, when discussing her Playboy cover shoot, she writes “Playboy then said that if I flash the same amount of skin that Heidi had, they would pay me a certain amount – I’m not gonna reveal too much here (it’s a trend!) but suffice it to say it was a very good amount of money” (119). That type of voice with its own interjections is very common in Suck It, Wonder Woman!.

Moreover, there is an irksome trend in Suck It, Wonder Woman! where Munn oscillates between namedropping (like Evander Holyfield) and protecting the identities of those to whom she alludes (a famous movie director whose bedroom she visited, yet remains unnammed). As well, references to her show, Attack Of The Show come out of nowhere and she assumes readers are invested in the work. She spends a lot of time writing about a petition that led to her and her co-host jumping into a giant pie while wearing french maid outfits. This incident includes Munn complaining about hitting a support bar and getting hurt on it and her co-host leaping in minutes later to the same fare, leaving the reader baffled as to why she did not warn her co-host about the peril!

Suck It, Wonder Woman! has moments of entertainment value, but on the whole, the book does not stack up as a memoir, an autobiography or a book of philosophies. Instead, it is a meandering narrative that never becomes anything cohesive. Munn might have something to say, but in Suck It, Wonder Woman!, she does not land her message, nor does she stick to her personal story enough to make the reader care about the woman behind the words. In short, Suck It, Wonder Woman! is a not-unpleasant volume that undersells itself on all counts.

For other books that have memoir, philosophy or autobiographical aspects, please visit my reviews of:
The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Stories I Only Tell My Friends By Rob Lowe
Keeping Faith By Jimmy Carter

3/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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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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Know Thy Enemy: A Progressive Reads Ralph Reed- Politically Incorrect

The Good: Articulately expresses the fundamentalist viewpoint on influencing politics
The Bad: Terrible reasoning and debate skills, Footnotes and references are silly, Generally poorly written
The Basics: Ralph Reed's manifesto for the Evangelicals is baffling with logical fallacies and poor debating skills, making one wish Reed could explain why he needs to tell others how to live.



I have been called, on many occasions, a Communist and as far as economic theory goes, I suppose I am. Communists are often laughed at as political idealists who are so out of touch with reality that our beliefs are laughable. I suppose that is what comes from expressing a belief that a system of economics where less than 1% of the population controls the fate and well-being of the other 99% is ultimately unsustainable and the most probable fate of such a system is a significant majority of that 99% will rise up and take what they believe they need to better themselves. As an offshoot of that economic belief, I have a strong belief that the political system that organizes itself around protecting that 1% from the other 99% will suffer greatly when the populous majority overthrows the economic majority. My point here is that I subscribe to a belief in an economic system and political belief that many find laughable.

It is, therefore, something significant for me to say that it was less than 10 pages into Ralph Reed's discourse Politically Incorrect that I found myself laughing out loud at the views expressed therein. Ralph Reed takes the position that if the United States were reorganized under the guidance of the Christian Coalition and other religious (read: Judeo-Christian) fundamentalists, "Government would be small because citizens and private institutions would voluntarily perform many of its functions. We would not need a large, bloated welfare state to take care of us, for we would take care of each other. . . . Through private initiatives and sound public policy, those who were hungry would be fed, those who were thirsty would drink, those who were homeless would be housed, and those who were hurting would be comforted."

Wow. And my views are mocked as "idealistic!"

I've noticed whenever I review a book written by a conservative author, I get a bunch of comments by people who attack my view, as opposed to either writing a review of their own, attacking my review or simply leaving well enough alone. In this review, I would like to emphasize that I am not spreading my viewpoints, but rather commenting on Politically Incorrect and while I detest Ralph Reed and his organization(s), I am thoroughly capable of writing a review without sinking to the level of ad hominem. So, for example, with Ralph Reed's dubious assertion that the United States would have a utopia if only Christians ran everything, his logic is baffling and false.

He begs the question: why can Christians (as defined by Reed and the Christian Coalition) only feed the hungry, house the homeless, and offer counseling if government is small? Reed insists that if government were small, we would not need a bloated welfare state (his words) because private initiatives would take their place. This begs the question, why haven't they? There is certainly no law stopping organizations from any religion from helping the poor, so why have they not transformed society to the way Reed writes they will?

The answers are simple: the book begins with false logic and proceeds throughout with logic that is dubious. Reed frequently defines the Evangelical and Roman Catholic populace in the United States as a disenfranchised population. There are no laws preventing Christians from voting, so their failure at any time to participate in the democratic process is not disenfranchisement it's either protest, laziness or a healthy understanding that in the United States voting ought not to be decided by religious viewpoints but by political goals. Reed belabors the concept that the Religious Right has been kept out of the political process when that is patently untrue, even at the time this book was written.

Moreover, much of the problem with Politically Incorrect is in the way Reed frames his debate. He constantly writes about instances where Christians are persecuted - for example, when prayers are said at government meetings - and he creates in this book the sense that the religion is threatened by the government. The problem with this entire line of reasoning and tactic of debate is that he creates the air of victimization around the Christians when no one is attacking their private right to express their faith.

Reed's desire to see Christians become political is not motivated by hate speech against Christians. It is not motivated by strings of attacks on Christians. It is not motivated by people blowing up churches. No, every example he cites in Politically Incorrect that he hopes to use to motivate people to enlist in the Christian Coalition come from reactions from Evangelicals attempting to assert their will on the general populace or government organizations! In short, all of Reed's examples essentially concede that the government is reacting to Evangelicals trying to tell others how to live their lives be it through marriage, abortion or what can or cannot be taught in school.

So, while he belabors the Scopes Trial (it is mentioned at least four times in this book, which was published in 1994!), Reed blindly expects the reader to agree with him without questioning the basic logic of his arguments. He objects to evolution being taught without Creationism being taught as well. The logical fallacy here is that there is not a single argument in the book to show that church schools are being influenced by the government. That is to say, Creationism is - by definition - a religious doctrine, taught in a secular society at a Church. Reed would have a case if the government was not allowing Creationism to be taught in church, he loses his argument when he asks for religious doctrine to be taught at public schools. It's pretty simple; public schools are founded on secular ideas, if you as a parent want your child taught another way, your options are to home school (which Reed encourages), send children to private schools (which Reed encourages), and/or to simply send your child to another religious school to supplement their secular education (which does not, in this text, occur to Reed). I suppose this means that Reed believes public school teachers are so good at their jobs that they are so convincing on such things as creation of the Universe, that church schools cannot compete to even express their own ideas coherently.

In the end, Politically Incorrect is a mess of ideas that presume the reader places the same value on certain hot-button issues as Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition. He assumes the reader essentially distrusts the government and sees it as too big. He proudly recalls the efforts he and his legions used to thwart the Clinton Health Care plan. Why? It had taxpayer funded abortions. Now, twelve years later (when I originally considered this book), I think it is germane to ask the question; how many people would rather have health care that allows them to see a doctor, get prescription drugs and provide for the basic health and well-being of you and your family even if it means that some people on the same plan might use it to get abortions?

In an investigation of a handful of Reed's citations, it is interesting to note that he cites other people's editorials when making citations of facts. Moreover, some of his sources are dubious, including one in one of the latter chapters that claims that 78% of African-Americans support the death penalty. Reed often cites sources for generalized quotes, but fails to cite some of his very specific numbers on other things. So, he will create a paragraph where he cites statistics on a viewpoint with source material footnoted, then make a statement on how the Christian Coalition can change things citing numbers (like population, percentage of people supporting something, or generalized statistics like on crime or schooling) which have no apparent basis but Reed's word.

Ralph Reed's logic is essentially that he and his followers know the right way for us to act and therefore we ought to cede our decisions to them. In his worldview, as expressed in Politically Incorrect, the Christian Coalition has a responsibility to prevent others from marrying, divorcing and/or having abortions. He views himself as a master of society, instead of truly understanding what freedom means.

On Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Odo once noted that with freedom of choice comes the freedom for people to make the wrong choice ("The Collaborator"). As Wanda Sykes said recently in one of her standup routines, "If you don't like gay marriage, don't marry a gay guy!" Similarly, Reed fails to make the argument for why anyone who is pregnant ought to be forced to see an unwanted child to term so it could be offered up for adoption. He never addresses the question of why the Christian Coalition cannot simply let abortion doctors and patients make their own decision and let him and his people be disgusted by it. If you're against abortion, don't have one. No one forces anyone to have one!

Instead, throughout Politically Incorrect, Reed makes sweeping statements about society and how Christians need to be involved in politics. Which brings me to my earlier point; Christians are involved in politics. Americans object only to them trying to tell others how to live and act based on legislation based on their faith as opposed to accepting others and understanding that not everyone is going to be Christian. Or Jewish. Or even have a religion.

Too bad there's no philosophy out there that teaches loving other people like you want to be loved. If there is, Ralph Reed's Politically Incorrect does not illustrate that he knows of such a philosophy. Or it illustrates that he certainly does not love himself.

For other political volumes, please visit my reviews of:
Keeping Faith - Jimmy Carter
Godless: The Church Of Liberalism - Ann Coulter
Letters To A Young Conservative - Dinesh D'Souza

1.5/10

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

© 2011, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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Do As I Say (And As I Do): Don't Buy This Book - Do As I Say (Not As I Do)!

The Good: Moments that are well-written and informative
The Bad: Largely comprised of an argument that neglects a larger fundamental argument
The Basics: Do As I Say (Not As I Do) - Profiles In Liberal Hypocrisy is a broad and ineffectual argument that falls short of doing the conservative movement justice.


With my many reviews, I have tried to reach a new audience beyond what my movie and music reviews might reach by exploring books and teas and even some healthcare products. To that end, I even subjected myself to the complete works of Ann Coulter, arguably finding a reference to one of my own reviews one of in her latest books, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (reviewed here!). So, when a friend of mine gave me a copy of Do As I Say (Not As I Do) by conservative researcher Peter Schweizer to read, I went into it with the same gusto as I had been evaluating other books by his peers.

Schweizer's premise is remarkably simple: prominent liberals are - almost without exception - hypocrites. Schweizer damns Gloria Steinem for marrying, Michael Moore for not hiring enough blacks, Al Franken for his sense of humor and perennial conservative target Hillary Clinton for acquiring material things. Schweizer's arguments target notable (supposed) liberals like Noam Chomsky, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Nader, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Barbra Streisand, and Cornel West. In each case, Schweizer details a public policy espoused by the person involved and then exposes how their personal views do the exact opposite of what they claim publicly.

First, I will admit that there are moments when Schweizer makes some decent points, like when he references that Barbra Streisand ". . . embraced the feminism of Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan . . ." (174), yet "All three of her husbands . . . are strong male personalities. Her longtime business manager is a man, and she has by and large had most of her business affairs conducted by men" (190). Yes, Schweizer rather effectively picks apart the hypocrisies of liberals who espouse a social agenda geared toward benefiting society at large. With virtually every economic populist detailed in the book - George Soros, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky - Schweizer illustrates . . . they have made money.

Yeah, I'm out of the good. Do As I Say (Not As I Do) is a ridiculous treatise that plays fast and loose with facts, neglects large principles and simply ignores concepts when they do not suit him. To begin, the premise of the book, as laid out in the introduction, is that liberals have delighted when conservatives are caught betraying their principles and there has been no similar venue for liberals who are caught in hypocritical actions (apparently neglecting the fact that talk radio in the United States is largely conservative with callers calling frequently to expose supposed-liberals for their shortcomings).

Schweizer reminds his readers, liberals ". . . got their first opportunity [to expose a conservative for hypocrisy] a few months later when it was revealed that radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was addicted to the prescription drug OxyContin, which he had been originally prescribed after back surgery in 1995" (2). Yes, many liberals were admittedly overjoyed when a man who had frequently called drug users stupid and weak turned out to be abusing drugs himself. Schweizer's defense: ". . . once his [Limbaugh's] illegal use of OxyContin began in 1996, he didn't return to the subject [of drug abuse]" (3). Somehow, it became less wrong in Schweizer's view that Limbaugh stopped railing on drug abusers once he became a drug abuser himself. That makes some sense, I suppose. But some of his establishing arguments make less sense; Dr. Laura's naked pictures, for example, only make sense in the context of the viewpoint she espouses. In other words, it is only because conservatives narrowly define good and evil and their terms that makes their hypocrisy noteworthy. Yes, I'll be the first to suggest that virtually every liberal I know has little or no problem with looking at nudity, finding nothing inherently wrong with being naked. That conservatives - like Dr. Laura - have hangups on nudity (often it goes back to the Bible wherein eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good And Evil, Adam and Eve realize they are naked - and that is apparently bad) and make judgments on that frames their entire world view and makes it ridiculously easy to spot when one of them falls down. Similarly, most of us liberals who are gay friendly would not give a damn about when one of the prominent conservatives turns out to be homosexual were it not for the exact same person who is outed venemously spreading hate about the "evils" of being gay. Yes, their hypocrisy is big and bad because much of the message they espouse is about how people ought to live their lives. Actually, it's how EVERYONE SHOULD live. They define decency and what kind of society the nation ought to be.

Liberals, while equally motivated, tend to have a much more relaxed world view. Yes, we might not have laissez fair economics, but for how people live their daily lives, we tend to be more "live and let live" than the vocal (and evangelical) conservatives. Schweizer does not see things that way. First, out of eleven figures surveyed in the book, only three - Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi - are actually in positions of public authority in politics where they can attempt to make the changes they speak about. Schweizer fails to give any credit where credit is due to people like Hillary Clinton. Railing against her materialistic nature, Schweizer neglects to mention the efforts - and humiliating defeat - Clinton made to try to get a universal health care system established in the United States.

Schweizer plays fast and loose with the facts in Do As I Say (Not As I Do). He carefully separates out cited facts, like one he references involving Michael Moore having bodyguards, with unsupported innuendo; his assertion that "Moore, who claimed in Bowling For Columbine that Americans buy guns out of irrational fear, surrounds themselves with armed guards out of his own paranoid fear of right-wing gun nuts" (43-44). This editorialization occurs between a few facts, cited from obscure sources. The one I took issue with was that Schweizer claims that after Moore declared he would hire more black people for his films in Stupid White Men (reviewed here!) that Moore failed to live up to that. Specifically, he cites (on page 48) that Moore's cameramen for Fahrenheit 9/11 (which he references as "911"), Moore's first film after penning Stupid White Men are white. However, if one actually watches Fahrenheit 9/11, in the scene on the mall in Washington D.C., a cameraperson is caught on film as two people try to get different angles of an altercation. And yes, the camera operator is a person of color. Rather extraordinarily, Schweizer wastes space by going back to all of Moore's projects from before he pledged to hire black people for his production company to try to damn Moore.

Schweizer also fails to note - when damning Moore for alleged anti-union activities - that Moore belongs to three unions!

Schweizer neglects rather large and important principles in Do As I Say (Not As I Do) when he long belabors Barbra Streisand's activism before admitting ". . . few outside her circle of admirers and friends take her all that seriously" (190). He denounces Streisand for promoting women's liberation and a feminist perspective of equality, while hiring men for some of her business affairs (190). Schweizer clearly does not understand that feminist perspective is not anti-male, but rather a world view of equality where all are treated based on their merits as opposed to judged by gender, sexuality or skin color. We feminists tend to acknowledge that there is an imbalance now and seek to rectify that by increasing opportunities for education and employment for those who have historically been oppressed in order to equalize the field. Most feminists will acknowledge that we're not there yet.

Similarly, Schweizer damns Gloria Steinem for marrying . . . 30 years after denouncing marriage in an article for Ms. Yes, in Schweizer's world view, people never change and as a result, because Steinem once declared she would never marry, over thirty years later, she ought to be sticking to that. Again, feminism is about choices and making personal choices based on individual desires as opposed to societal demands. Schweizer's neglect of the actual principles of feminism is intellectually criminal.

Moreover, many of Schweizer's targets are people who are either entertainers or only marginally liberal. When I consider great liberals in modern times, Nancy Pelosi is never the top of my list. Similarly, Al Franken and Barbra Streisand are entertainers and their commentaries on social and political should be taken through that lens. And as for his legitimate targets, like consumer activist Ralph Nader, one has to ask, "What is the point?" While Rush Limbaugh sits around for hours kvetching on the radio about how stupid and misguided liberals are, Ralph Nader crusades for safer automobiles for everyone. Yeah, he deserves to be considered one of history's villains.

Finally, most of the arguments in Do As I Say (Not As I Do) condemn those who have money and rail against the tax codes for using tax loopholes. As a Marxist, I'm all for the cause of things like keeping the estate tax and taxing the hell out of the ultra rich to fund social programs to lift people out of poverty - and, you know, feed them. People like Noam Chomsky, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and George Soros all tend to agree with that, too (Clinton, for example, has voted against repealing the estate tax). However, as Schweizer notes, all of these people have money and have set up tax shelters to avoid paying taxes on them. Yes, this is troubling - less in the case of Soros who has been remarkably philanthropic - but it is not illegal. Until they actually succeed in their social crusade to change the tax codes, not using it to protect their wealth is roughly equivalent to knowingly plugging oneself into The Matrix and refusing to eat and enjoy the steak.

In other words, this is a short book with a lot of rather broad, underdeveloped or unsupported arguments that do little service to the cause Schweizer proclaims to love.

For other political books, please visit my reviews of:
Keeping Faith by Jimmy Carter
Letters To A Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza
Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

3.5/10

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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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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Ramblings Of A Reasonably Articulate (If Unconvincing) Conservative: Letters To A Young Conservative.

The Good: Good diction, Short
The Bad: Poorly developed arguments backed by no citations, Vast generalities, Far too much first-person, Unconvincing
The Basics: Despite one or two well-written lines that illustrate genuine intellectual discourse, the high level of vocabulary and diction cannot disguise the unconvincing ramblings of the author.


It would surprise very few of my readers to know that I generally associate myself with liberalism and the fight for freedom over the forces bent on exerting power and control. I am proud of fighting the good fight, exposing hypocrisy and relishing in satire where appropriate. But as part of being a liberal, it is my responsibility to expose myself to the views of the other side and try to understand where they are coming from and what their grievances with my lifestyle and viewpoints truly is. To that end, I try to find the leading conservative voices of our age and read their works to find out what's going on on their side of the political divide. I've read some of the works of Ralph Reed and Ann Coulter and largely been unimpressed with their grasp of logic, reason and basic diction, as well as their ability to write - especially without resorting to logical fallacies.

So, when I heard about the book Letters To A Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza - a conservative I had never heard of nor read anything by - I was only too happy to pick up a copy and see what I was missing out on. What I discovered was a simple, 229 page collection of thirty-one letters from D'Souza to an aspiring libertarian conservative named Chris. This is an easy-to-read collection that seeks to inform Chris on the ways to become a D'Souza style neoconservative and needle liberals in the intellectual sphere. The book unabashedly presents D'Souza's viewpoints in stylistically matter-of-fact proclamations that read like a Gospel and establish a clear set of mandates and intellectual frameworks for those aspiring to be Dinesh D'Souza.

First, what works. Letters To A Young Conservative is a quick read with short chapters and a narrative style that is as disarming as it is undeveloped. D'Souza writes in a conversational style that presents his points as a series of seemingly self-evident "facts" that need no hard evidence to back up. Indeed, while D'Souza happily accepts (on page 38) that those in the liberal community have accused him of intellectual fraud, I believe such a charge (and therefore his acceptance of it) is bogus. Why? D'Souza's book is largely a simple collection of opinions. A person cannot be convicted of intellectual fraud if they are not making an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual argument. If someone is simply spouting off opinions, it does not make them an authority on any of the subjects that they opining on, it simply makes them opinionated. Letters To A Young Conservative is, at best, a collection of almost random thoughts that express largely unsubstantiated viewpoints as nothing more than one man's opinion. For sure, there are moments where D'Souza claims the voice of conservatism, but he has no authority to do that other than his own words.

The only other redeeming aspect of this book is that D'Souza lives up to a proud tradition of writers who actually know words. D'Souza has a decent vocabulary and a reasonably good sense of diction that comes across in an easy-to-read conversational style that is stylistically inoffensive. D'Souza manages to use the highest level of diction I've read in a conservative writer outside George Will.

What D'Souza lacks is Will's ability to present an argument and make a fair fight of the liberal and conservative divide by presenting facts and well-cited statistics. Instead, Letters To A Young Conservative is filled with logical flaws, opinions, undeveloped arguments and an intellectually lazy sense that pervades the entire work. It is more self-referential than anything, devoting a ridiculous amount of time and space to the prior works and accomplishments of Dinesh D'Souza. Indeed, D'Souza references his prior book, Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader, in a few places and essentially states that the letter that comprises Chapter 8 is a a long summary of the thesis of that book.

Letters To A Young Conservative is an intellectually dishonest work that presents conservatives as a bastion of moral and constitutional correctness, without putting up the pretense of any sense of balance or self-examination that is not simply D'Souza's unsubstantiated claims of what - and who - conservatives are. For example, Chapter 16 focuses on the role of the Supreme Court and on pages 124 and 125, D'Souza derides liberal Justices Earl Warren, William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and David Souder for their judicial activism, complaining ". . . these people are policymakers masquerading as judges" (124). The argument he makes fails to take into account two essential things: first, as members of the Supreme Court Justices have a responsibility to strike down laws they deem unconstitutional and send such laws back to the legislative branch to revise (and until Congress creates a new law Courts tend to simply uphold the rulings of prior Courts) and second, conservative Supreme Court justices engage in judicial activism just as much as liberal ones. So, while D'Souza toes the familiar conservative line of berating the current liberal justices for supporting the Row vs. Wade ruling (a ruling that the legislature has never been bold enough to follow up with explicit laws or Constitutional Amendments), he fails to acknowledge the grossest act of judicial activism in the history of the United States; the intervention of the Supreme Court into the presidential election of 2000. The irony here is that in neglecting this important act, D'Souza makes himself look somewhat ridiculous when he claims that conservatives do not want a Supreme Court that contravenes the Constitution and the desires of the American people (127) and cites George W. Bush as saying that we need justices that act within the parameters of the Constitution! Failing to address the most grievous leap outside the letter of the Constitution while making the broad generalizations that liberals are the ones who want activist judges clearly illustrates that D'Souza is not making much in the way of a balanced argument.

Truth be told, he's not making much of an argument at all. Letters To A Young Conservative reads as a mismatch of opinions that never fly near logic, even with a cursory reading. Indeed, one might suspect that conservatives reading the book will cringe when D'Souza begins writing about gender discrimination in the workplace. He concedes very early on that there is an earning discrepancy, when he writes, "The seventy cents figure that feminists have publicized is accurate enough . . ." (102). But his logical drop-off comes in the end of that sentence and a nearby sentence as he writes ". . . but it carries the presumption that women are earning 70 percent of what men earn for doing the same job" (102) and ". . . should we be surprised that female executive assistants make less money than male executives" (103)? Well, yes, Dinesh. You've offered us nothing more than the broad idea that somehow there are different expectations for male executive assistants versus female executive assistants. And where anyone with any training in debate would expect the next line to follow up and prove that somehow men are more valuable in this position than women with some proof, D'Souza jumps the argument by returning to the idea that sometimes women take different jobs than men and they some have babies. Given the opportunity to serious compare apples and apples - men and women doing the exact same job and being paid differently, D'Souza flees the argument and leaps back to generalities that remain unsubstantiated.

There are no citations, no footnotes in Letters To A Young Conservative. Instead, D'Souza makes broad generalizations and assumes his readers will take it on the faith of his word, like when he states, ". . . we recognize that whatever the government does, it usually does it badly" (79). I've never been an apologist for our government, but the idea that the majority of things the United States government does, it does poorly (an idea utterly confounded by the efficiency of dollars to services of the Medicaid program vs. the health care/insurance industry) makes anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of logic sit up and wonder how D'Souza can write that liberals hate America. After all, either D'Souza and his conservative allies are misanthropes and masochists - loving a government that does what it does badly - or the liberals hate America in a way is somehow more offensive than the way the conservatives hate it. D'Souza's entire text opens itself up to this sort of convoluted questioning because he does not truly ever stick the intellectual landing.

From the outset, D'Souza writes with an "us vs. them" subtext that pits liberals versus conservatives in a way that is remarkably uncompromising. So, when on pages seven and eight he lists the traits of liberals and conservatives, he notes that both sides share "equality" as a value, but he wastes no time in trying to differentiate between the notions of equality. In other words, in the D'Souza conservative, there are no shared values, there is little that binds us and virtually everything that divides us. This becomes especially disingenuous when he frames what makes liberals so dangerous in his viewpoint. He sees two movements in the twentieth century as moments when liberals co-opted the national agenda and hijacked the principles of the nation. Citing the actions of FDR, he states, ". . . people who lack life's necessities are not free [italicized in text]. Roosevelt believed that to give citizens true liberty, the government should insure them against deprivation, against the loss of a job, against calamitous illness, and against an impoverished old age" (3). As a conservative, D'Souza objects to this because it makes government bigger than the Founders intended. But in order to accept this idea and that it truly is a divisive issue between liberals and conservatives, D'Souza would need to illustrate that the majority of American conservatives reject the notion of beneficial government on principle alone. Despite the rhetoric, many of the poorest rural communities choose to exercise the benefits of a benevolent government rather than starve. So, for example, in Upstate New York, which is generally socially conservative as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of registered Republicans who consistently vote for conservative candidates, there is great poverty from the collapse of family farms (usually dairy farms) and many families rely on food stamps, WIC assistance and/or HEAP (an energy bill supplement from the state government) to eat and/or heat their homes during the brutal winters. Regardless of how they might respond when asked in a survey these people who are generally conservative rely on that benevolent government and the principle they exercise is evident by the check they cash.

But many books like this leave me with a favorite section and Letters To A Young Conservative is no exception. In the chapter "Why Government Is The Problem," D'Souza creates a rather ridiculous argument premised on the idea that "It is one thing for the government to provide the basic necessities of life to the 'truly needy' . . . It is another thing for the government to take resources from one middle-class family and give them to another middle-class family" (77). This rather silly premise - which I phrase that way because virtually every liberal from the moderates to the Marxists does not want to redistribute wealth among the middle-class, we want to take it from the rich and distribute it to the poor and lower middle class! - cites the use of mass transit systems and the art grants of the NEA as examples of how middle-class wealth is redistributed among the families. Most of the expense of mass transit systems in the United States is paid for by the users of the system (hence fees to ride the subway AND tolls on thruways), but the complaint about National Endowment For The Arts grants does not logically follow. This absence of concrete examples of how liberals want to rob one middle-class family to aid other middle-class families - as opposed to our unabashed oft-stated desire to take from the top and insure the bottom gets better - is completely contradicted in the rest of the chapter and in the subsequent chapter were the examples illustrate the divide between the rich and the middle-class, with D'Souza complaining that the rich pay more money in taxes. What he never acknowledges is that while the rich he is busy protecting pay more money in taxes (well, duh, they have more money!) they almost always pay a lesser PERCENTAGE of their income in taxes, as billionaire Warren Buffet beautifully illustrated in 2007 with an article he published surveying the difference between his own tax rate and the rates of his employees!

The only thing more convoluted than his lame attempts to actually argue a point is when he surrenders logic entirely and makes broad statements that he expects will be taken as truth. While D'Souza no doubt believes the tenacity of his claims, it is hard not to laugh out loud (I failed in my attempt to contain myself) when - in railing against gay marriage, D'Souza writes "Marriage doesn't civilize men, women do" (173). Not only is this a pretty grave understanding on what the function of women and/or marriage is, it becomes a trite argument for why men cheat; their women didn't civilize them right! After degenerating into the usual conservative comparisons likening homosexuality to incest and bestiality (174), D'Souza blithely states that gays ought to quit complaining because they do have the right to marry, which as he observes, "They have the right to marry adult members of the opposite sex" (177). I wish to point out that it would make a homosexual pretty lousy at what they do if they, you know, got into a faithful heterosexual relationship.

My point with all this is not to actually debunk D'Souza's arguments but rather to illustrate that D'Souza is not so much making arguments as passing on stories and loosely collected ideas (in one place, page 45 - 46, he - seriously - cites an exchange with a college student who was drinking!) with little sense of standards or intellectual discrimination between them. This book, then, becomes more of a memoir and collection of opinions rather than any sort of intellectual discourse, which is what it is masquerading as. The result is a body of letters as likely to make conservatives cringe for their lack of coherency as liberals cringe for the blind conviction they portray.

For other books filled with political ideas and observations, please check out:
Treason By Ann Coulter
Keeping Faith By Jimmy Carter
Stupid White Men By Michael Moore

3/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page for an organized list of them! That is available 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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