Brainless

The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter

Joe Maguire

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780061739620
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Chapter 1

Why Ann Coulter Must Be Stopped
OR
“Annoyance” Starts with “Ann”

Arguments by demonization,
rather than truth and light,
can be presumed to be fraudulent.

—ANN COULTER

You are (check as many of the following boxes as apply):

• Black
• Hispanic
• Asian
• a Democrat
• Jewish
• Muslim
• Gay/Lesbian
• Open to learning something

If you meet one or more of the preceding criteria, read on. If, on the other hand, you’re one of the tiny minority of Americans who is white, male, and a staunch conservative proud of his bigotry, feel free to close this book now. Put it back on the shelf and walk out of the store.

On second thought, even if you didn’t check a box, this book is for you. In fact, it’s especially for you. Abbie Hoffman aside, not many authors would ask you not to buy the book they’ve just written. And this is no different. At the risk of overstating the case, what you’re about to read may change the way you look at the world. And even if it doesn’t, it will certainly change the way you look at Ann Coulter, who—if she is to be believed—has the only worldview worth considering.

Chances are, of course, you checked a box. After all, fewer than 20 percent of us are white, male, and Republican. And far fewer than that are the kind to shell out twenty-eight bucks to read the sort of prejudiced bile contained in Ann Coulter’s latest book, Godless—the Church of Liberalism. But there it is on the New York Times bestseller list, proving yet again that we are more interested in controversy and colorful comebacks than we are in intelligent discourse. More interested in The Daily Show than the daily paper.

There’s no denying that the level of political debate in this country has sunk like the Lusitania. Beyond the incomprehensible shouting that is the bread and butter of cable news shows, “serious” news programs these days offer little more than the pitting of one peevish pundit against another. The “politics of personal destruction” has gone from clever catchphrase to viable election strategy. The smear campaign is par for the political course. And while, in the words of the Boston Globe, “this darkest of the dark arts is likely to continue,”¹ that doesn’t mean we should let it happen without a fight. We should resist such a thing with every ounce of our political awareness. The day we have a president whose handlers are adept enough to make it seem as if he is the war hero is the day we should take a closer look at who is directing campaign traffic. The day we consider it okay to cut down opponents without offering anything of substance is the day we need to re-evaluate who it is we’re listening to.

This is where Ann Coulter comes in.

Of the dozens of talking heads responsible for the increasing polarity of our politics, Ann Coulter may be the most maddening. Rather than suggest a solution, she is content to lay blame. Rather than generate a game plan, she will merely point a finger. And so this book is for those of you who want to understand the damage that people like Ann Coulter are doing to America.

I read Godless, Ann Coulter’s most recent book, because I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. I had heard the quotes about the 9/11 widows and figured it was just more of the same old psycho I’d seen on TV. You know—the one who starts every response with, “Well, the liberals are wrong because…” no matter what the topic is. The one who thinks a hair flip and an eye roll is a rebuttal. But as I got deeper into Godless, it became increasingly apparent that she’s more than just shrill finger-pointing. The arguments she makes are misleading to the point of being outright lies. On top of that, they’re often irrelevant and typically directed at people rather than positions.

Normally, in the face of such blather, I’d move on and try to find something a bit more reasonable. But it’s hard to ignore someone who tosses around words like “harpies” and “raghead”—especially when that person has been so sanctimonious as to utter the above quote about personal attacks. Ann Coulter is absolutely right when she says that “arguments by demonization…can be presumed to be fraudulent.”² Which kind of casts a shadow over…oh…just about everything she’s ever written.

To Ann, having John Goodman play Linda Tripp on Saturday Night Live is just another sign that liberals aren’t fighting fair. It “isn’t humor, it’s hatred. They aren’t trying to be funny, they’re trying to make their victims hurt.”³ Meanwhile, it’s apparently the height of rational debate when she says of four widows of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that she’s “never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”⁴ To suggest that their husbands would soon divorce them because their “shelf life is dwindling” and they’d “better hurry up and appear in Playboy”⁵ is satire so sophisticated it makes Jonathan Swift look like Adam Sandler.

Coulter often claims that some of her more outrageous statements are, in fact, meant to be funny. She told Time magazine that it’s the inability of people to see the joke that is the problem. “What pisses me off,” she said, “is when they don’t get the punch line.”⁶ Bear in mind that this was in reference to her “joke” that God gave us the earth to “rape.” Simply put, the day the distinction is lost between Swift’s satiric suggestion that the Irish eat their babies and Ann’s claiming our right to rape the planet is a sad one. It’s the day nothing is funny anymore. “A Modest Proposal” is a classic exactly because the Irish don’t eat their young. What makes the rape-the-planet reference so unfunny is that it has been a way of life for half the world’s corporations since the dawn of the industrial revolution 250 years ago.

Still, maybe we should give Ann the benefit of the doubt. We don’t all have the same sense of humor, after all. If she’s looking for a laugh, let’s take it at face value. As she told Time, “Most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that.”⁷

At the same time, this lack of cogitation may help explain her later statement on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donnie Deutsch on July 1, 2006. “I believe everything I say,” she told the host, who had dared to suggest otherwise.

Either way, Ann Coulter contends that “there are substantive arguments contained in conservative name-calling.”⁸ This might explain why she feels it’s okay to say that former president Jimmy Carter “is so often maligned for his stupidity, it tends to be forgotten that he is also self-righteous, vengeful, sneaky, and backstabbing.”⁹ After all, we’re talking about the guy responsible for the Camp David Accords and the SALT II Treaty (an essential step toward the end of the Cold War), and who, after leaving office, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Clearly, calling Carter “sneaky” and “backstabbing” is a sign of substance.

Accusing him of treasonous behavior for his vocal opposition to the war in Iraq, however, crosses the line into absurdity. If Ann Coulter, a self-described expert on constitutional law, thinks that our most popular ex-president¹⁰ should be put to death for crimes against the country, where does that leave the rest of us? Ann Coulter’s calling for the head of Jimmy Carter is nothing more than sensationalistic sneering at a statesman the respect for whom spans the globe. It is nothing more than the sort of opportunistic mudslinging that is her stock-in-trade.

At the same time, Ann Coulter probably considers herself to be a big fan of Carter, if only in contrast to her views on Bill Clinton. She’s got an awful lot to say about our forty-second president, especially given that conservatives in America “are the most tolerant (and long-suffering) people in the world.”¹¹ And that tolerance really shows in things like the following:

When Clinton first showed his fat, oleaginous mug to the nation, the Republicans screamed he was a draft-dodging, pot-smoking flimflam artist…. So the Democrats lied. Through their infernal politics of personal destruction, liberals stayed in the game for a few more years.¹²

What Ann Coulter doesn’t seem to realize is that she owes pretty much her whole career to Bill Clinton. After all, his presidency gave her her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, which she has deftly parlayed into a career as a well-paid pundit. It has also afforded her the opportunity to make highly pertinent points about his impeachment. Naturally, what she has done with those opportunities is to squander them to make room for McDonald’s jokes and assertions that Clinton is a rapist. And these are the sorts of things Ann dredges up to make points about liberals now.

Then again, at least there’s a tenuous link between Clinton and today’s liberals. Bubba was undeniably the left’s two-term golden boy, and he remains an influential figure in the Democratic Party. His wife may be on the verge of a presidential run, and he has forged a role as an elder statesman of his party. So, holding him up as all that is wrong with liberalism—if misguided—bears at least some significance. If only all of Ann’s arguments were as up-to-date.

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10 PEOPLE ANN HATES

• 1. President Bill Clinton
• 2. Senator Hillary Clinton
• 3–6. The “Jersey Girls” 9/11 widows
• 7. Comedian Al Franken
• 8. Actor George Clooney
• 9. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
• 10. Herself

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While 2002’s Slander—Liberal Lies About the American Right took on conservatives’ nemeses such as the New York Times and…well…that was pretty much it, her follow-up was little more than a paean to Joe McCarthy. More than a quarter of Treason’s nearly three hundred pages refer to the senator—who, many of you probably didn’t know, was apparently one of the most beloved figures in American history. Or so Ann Coulter is determined to convince us.

McCarthy died—as in…died—a half century ago. Bill Clinton was ten years old. Times columnist Maureen Dowd was five. Ann Coulter herself wouldn’t be born for another four years. Or six. She tends to lie about that. But the point is, denying the existence of McCarthyism while simultaneously blaming liberals for it is about as meaningful as saying 9/11 was the firemen’s fault.

To be fair, Treason does contain a generous helping of Reagan worship and an effort to rewrite the history of the U.S. effort in Vietnam—as suggested by the rather windy subtitle Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. And it has been Ann Coulter’s best seller so far, moving nearly 400,000 hardcover copies.¹³ And so, after sales slipped for 2004’s How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), which was primarily a compilation of her syndicated newspaper columns, it’s no surprise that she went back to basics for Godless.

As if to outdo the anachronisms in Treason, Ann goes prewar for her latest tome. And we’re not talking before Bush 41’s little fling in the Middle East. We’re going years before the big one. Dubya Dubya Two. Rehashing the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg apparently won’t do. Ann Coulter is going to take us all the way back to the first Red Scare and the root of all our current problems: Sacco and Vanzetti. Oh, that and the Scopes Monkey Trial.

If only that were a joke.

You see, Ann’s typical MO is to take a piece of history and turn it into a sign that liberals have destroyed America. Which would be easy to dismiss if she just weren’t so darn vituperative. And off the mark.

The fact is, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted…and put to death…for the crimes they committed. It remains to be seen how liberals can be blamed for the conviction and execution of two murderers.

But that’s what Ann Coulter would have you believe. In her mind, everything is the fault of liberals. And everything is personal. Instead of simply asserting that she feels the 9/11 widows are being used as political pawns, she has to call them “harpies.” Instead of simply questioning Michael Dukakis’s record, Ann has to refer to him as a “Greek midget.” Instead of…well, you get the point.

But even the nastiness could be excused if the arguments themselves were well-constructed. Solid reasoning—with logical conclusions based on valid premises—can be respected regardless of the rancor that accompanies it. Because let’s face it, a lot of today’s political debate is infotainment at best and outright guilty pleasure at worst. The sedate Sunday-morning talk show isn’t nearly as much fun to watch as Jon Stewart calling Tucker Carlson a “dick” on CNN’s Crossfire.¹⁴ Still, when polit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Why Ann Coulter Must Be Stopped OR “Annoyance” Starts with “Ann”
• Chapter 2: Ann on Beauty, Race, and Culture OR The Pot Calls the Kettle the “New Black”
• Chapter 3: Ann on Women OR Mano-a-Mano with the Fairer Sex
• Chapter 4: Ann on Sex and Abortion OR Fetus Don’t Fail Me Now
• Chapter 5: Ann on Religion OR There’s Only “Right” and Wrong
• Chapter 6: Ann Has It Both Ways OR Mighty (Herm)aphrodite
• Chapter 7: Ann on 9/11 OR With Friends Like Ann, Who Needs Enemies?
• Chapter 8: Ann and Research OR When the Cat’s Away, the Mice Will Plagiarize
• Chapter 9: Ann Speaks OR Under a Series of Men Is Not the Only Place She Lies
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher