Monday, September 16, 2002

 
BOOK REVIEW: SLANDER: LIBERAL LIES ABOUT THE AMERICAN RIGHT (2002) no stars (0 stars out of 4).
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The deliberate misstatements in this this infuriating screed, which is actually the number one best-selling book on the New York Times bestseller list right now, are very well documented. I was shocked to learn there were so many provably false statements in the book, which the author, conservative pundit Ann Coulter, constantly boasts contains 35 pages of footnotes. When I was reading it, I had taken her at her word in her recounting of provable facts. There are lots of Web sites devoted to compiling examples of Coulter's outright lies. A nice set of links, and some contributions of his own, can be found at Scoobie Davis Online, so I won't bother to list them here. What I want to talk about is not Coulter's constant misstatements of facts, but her consistent misuse of logic.

Practically all of her arguments fall into this format:
Liberals always do X, and they never do Y.
Conservatives always do Y, and they never do X.
Here are some examples of Liberals doing X.
There, you see? I've proved it.

Thus, suppose Ann Coulter wanted to prove that the New York Times only ever runs sports stories, and never runs any other kind of stories, unlike the conservative Washington Times, which would never dream of publishing a story about sports. The proof would go like this:

Look at these headlines from today's New York Times: "Redesigned Yankees to Face an October of Uncertainties", "The Giants Aren't Out When Down", "W.N.B.A. and Players See No Urgency to Start Talks." Story after story in The New York Times deals with nothing but the subject of sports, to the exclusion of all other forms of discourse. Can you even imagine stories like this running in the Washington Times? No, of course you can't, because the liberal media would never let them get away with it. (Of course, let me be clear that, as everyone knows, The New York Times publishes stories about national, international, and business news, among many other categories, and the Washington Times does have a sports section.)

This goes to her central argument, which is that all liberals only engage in name-calling, and never engage in meaningful debate, and all conservatives always engage in meaningful debate, and never engage in name-calling. Now, we all know that this is absurd. In the first place, there are lots and lots of very thoughtful liberal commentators who publish interesting and engaging arguments that do not resort to name calling. There are so many of these, and they are so easy to find if you look for them, that I do not think there is any point to singling out any of them here. It wasn't a liberal who coined the term "faminazis"; it was Anne's hero, Rush Limbaugh. It wasn't a liberal who said that Socks is the White House cat, and Chelsea is the White House dog, it was Limbaugh again. It wasn't a liberal who wrote a memo instructing conservative candidates to call their opponents "bizarre", "corrupt", "destructive", a "disgrace", "incompetent", "insecure", "insensitive", "intolerant", "pathetic", "radical", "self-serving", "selfish", "shallow", "sick", "traitors"-- it was Newt Gingrich. It wasn't a liberal who turned the word "liberal" itself into an insulting label, it was George Bush the elder. And, of course, it wasn't a liberal who called called Gloria Steinem a "deeply ridiculous figure", Christie Todd Whitman a "birdbrain", Adlai Stevenson a "boob" and a "blowhard", Michael Moore a "working-class phony", Jim Jeffords a "half-wit", letter-writers to the NY Times "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", American Journalists "retarded", Bill Clinton a "rapist"--those were all said by Coulter herself. But her argument goes like this: here's some examples of liberals engaging in name-calling. There, you see? I've proved it. Liberals always engage in name-calling, and conservatives never do.

This pattern appears over and over. She says the New York Times is liberal. Then she mentions some of the occasions where the New York Times took the liberal position on an issue in one of its editorials. There, you see? She says that liberals call conservative women ugly, but conservatives never call liberal women ugly, and she gives a couple of examples of conservative women who were called ugly (even as she, in the very same sentence, calls Bella Abzug ugly!) There, you see?

Here's another great example of how she twists the facts. I don't have the page right in front of me, but in her attempt to portray the New York Times as left-wing, she says that because they have been endorsing Democrats, it's been more than a quarter of a century since the New York Times endorsed a presidential candidate who has won a majority of the popular vote. Now, I'll take Coulter's word that that's true. But, of course, it's been more than 13 of those 25 years, since any presidential candidate won a majority of the popular vote, and in every one of those presidential elections, The New York Times endorsed the candidate who got the largest percentage of the popular vote.

I'd like to think that I would be just as harsh if Coulter were a liberal or a nonpartisan writer. I was very troubled by some of the distortions in Michael Moore's book, Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!, but he really did have some redeemingly good ideas, and, more importantly, he regards himself as a humorist, and his book is labeled as a humor book. Coulter's latest book is incorrectly labeled as non-fiction. I had a lot of criticism of Bork's book, The Tempting of America, but I also gave it its share of praise, and gave it 3 stars out of 4.

I find it hard to believe that many people will be converted by her book. Anyone so easily duped as to fall for her nonsensical arguments and insupportable assertions has probably already been inducted into a cult, long ago. Anyone who is already so pre-disposed to agree with her that they don't catch the illogic and inconsistency of what she says, is going to be woefully unprepared in an argument about politics with any liberal or moderate who is older than nine. So, despite its popularity, I'm pretty sure the book is harmless for the most part.

The only positive things that I can think of to say about the book are these. First, as I said, Coulter has obviously lied when she said that liberals call conservative women ugly, but conservatives never call liberal women ugly. Conservatives do it plenty, they do it famously, and they do it to children. But she is right that media pundits have no business insulting women's appearances, no matter what their politics are. I haven't verified this, and I know that Coulter lies a lot, so I don't know for sure if this is true, but she says that Linda Tripp and Paula Jones both have gotten plastic surgery after they had their appearances brutally insulted in the media. That's really terrible, and those insults should stop. Coulter is right to raise that issue, even though she is lying about who does it and who it's done to. Second, I can say this positive thing about the book. It really is of great comfort to me as a liberal that on page after page, she demonstrates that she knows that she has to lie, distort, and make logical errors when trying to prove her points, more or less without exception, because, presumably, she knows that she could not have defended her views successfully by telling the truth.

This is The Official Record. 11:32 PM
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2002/09/book-review-slander-liberal-lies-about.html


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