This forceful, sarcastic, and often hilarious book offers tips on arguing with liberals, which include the following: don't be defensive, always outrage the enemy, and never apologize to, compliment, or show graciousness to a Democrat. Welcome to the world according to Ann Coulter. Ever combative, Coulter is unafraid to court controversy or confront her detractors head-on, whether they are mainstream journalists and talk-show hosts who have misquoted her without apology or "weak and frightened conservatives" craving liberal approval. Though the writing is often over-the-top, the book if full of one-liners that will delight conservatives, such as "the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents' home, get a job, and start paying taxes." But there is more here than just insults and countless jabs at Bill Clinton, and even her most devoted readers will find much new material in the book. Largely a collection of her syndicated columns from the past decade,
How to Talk to a Liberal also includes columns that were never released or were rejected by editors--in Coulter's words, "what you could have read if you lived in a free country." --
Shawn Carkonen
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Never mind this books title; from the writings collected here, it sounds like Coulter has never talked calmly with anyone, much less "liberals." In her view, "liberals" arent even "sentient creatures." Rather, they are conspiracy theorists and "street performers" who "traffic in shouting and demagogy." Following her previous bestseller, Treason, this book reprints installments from the last five years of Coulters syndicated column. Her modus operandi is to "start with the maximum assertion about liberals and then push the envelope, because, as we know, their evil is incalculable." If the title isnt clue enough, the "we" in that quote demonstrates her assumption that the reader is as angry as she is, which frees her to make any accusation, whether grounded in reality or not. Coulters favorite target, hands down, is the New York Times, which she claims distorts the truth, ignores the facts or gets them wrong altogether. Her proposed solution for the 2001 incident in which Chinas "three-foot-tall dictator" held an American flight crew hostage: "give us the Americans and well let them keep any New York Times reporters." Not surprisingly, she was in favor of attacking Iraq, and many of her columns dating back to the first months of the invasion sound exceedingly out of touch now ("The rebuilding in Iraq is going better than could possibly have been expected"). Besides previously printed columns, the book includes a few new pieces on Coulters pet peeves (like Democrats "double standards"), as well as articles rejected by editors at magazines like the National Review and Good Housekeeping. Frequently funny, if only for its sheer audacity, this book will gratify "cranky conservatives" and outrage everyone else.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From the Inside Flap
Welcome to the world of Ann Coulter. With her monumental bestsellers Treason, Slander, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Coulter has become the most recognized and talked-about conservative intellectual in years—and certainly the most controversial. Now, in How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), which is sure to ignite impassioned debate, she offers her most comprehensive analysis of the American political scene to date. With incisive reasoning, refreshing candor, and razor-sharp wit, she reveals just why liberals have got it so wrong.
In this powerful and entertaining book, which draws on her weekly columns, Coulter ranges far and wide. No subject is off-limits, and no comment is left unsaid. After all, she writes, "Nothing too extreme can be said about liberals because it's all true." How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) offers Coulter's unvarnished take on:
•The essence of being a liberal: "The absolute conviction that there is one set of rules for you, and another, completely different set of rules for everyone else."
•John Kerry: "A reporter asked Kerry, ‘Are you for or against gay marriage?' As usual, his answer was, ‘Yes.' "
•Her 9/11 comments: "I am often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever!"
•The state of the Democratic Party: "Teddy Kennedy crawls out of Boston Harbor with a quart of Scotch in one pocket and a pair of pantyhose in the other, and Democrats hail him as their party's spiritual leader."
•Her philosophy for arguing with liberals: "Tough love, except I don't love them. My ‘tough love' approach is much like the Democrats' ‘middle-class tax cuts'—everything but the last word."
•The "Treason Lobby": "Want to make liberals angry? Defend the United States."
In this full-on Coulterpalooza, you'll find the real, uncensored Ann Coulter. A special concluding chapter even includes the pieces that squeamish editors refused to publish—"what you could have read if you lived in a free country," says Coulter. How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) is a stunning reminder of why Ann Coulter's commentary has achieved must-read status.
"A fluent polemicist with a gift for Menckenesque invective...and she can harness such language to subtle, syllogistic argument."--Washington Post Book World
"Ann Coulter is a trailblazer."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"She can zing one-liners faster than Zeus can throw lightning bolts."--Kansas City Star
"You know those pundits who bore you to tears trying to balance everyone's point of view? Coulter isn't one."--People
"A great deal of research supports Ms. Coulter's wisecracks."--New York Times
"The conservative movement has found its diva."--Bill Maher
"Ann Coulter is a pundit extraordinaire."--Rush Limbaugh
Also available as a Random House AudioBook and as an e-Book
About the Author
ANN COULTER is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Treason, Slander, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors. She is the legal correspondent for Human Events and a syndicated columnist for Universal Press Syndicate. A frequent guest on many TV shows, she was named one of the top public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001. You can read her weekly column on her website, www.anncoulter.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
How to Talk to a Liberal
Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents' home, get a job, and start paying taxes. But if this doesn't work, you might have to actually argue with a liberal. This is not for the faint of heart. It is important to remember that when arguing with liberals, you are always within inches of the "Arab street." Liberals traffic in shouting and demagogy. In a public setting, they will work themselves into a dervish-like trance and start incanting inanities: "Bush lied, kids died!" "racist!" "fascist!" "fire Rumsfeld!" "Halliburton!" Fortunately, the street performers usually punch themselves out eventually and are taken back to their parents' house.
Also resembling the Arab street, liberals are chock-full of conspiracy theories. They invoke weird personal obsessions like a conversational deus ex machina to trump all facts. You think you're talking about the war in Iraq and suddenly you start getting a disquisition on Nixon, oil, the neoconservatives, Vietnam (Tom Hayden discusses gang violence in Los Angeles as it relates to Vietnam), or whether Bill O'Reilly's former show, Inside Edition, won the Peabody or the Peanuckle Award. This is because liberals, as opposed to sentient creatures, have a finite number of memorized talking points, which they periodically try to shoehorn into unrelated events, such as when Nancy Pelosi opposed the first Gulf war in 1991 on the grounds that it would cause environmental damage in Kuwait. Oddly enough, about half of liberal conspiracy theories involve the Jews. So be prepared for that.
A major impediment to arguing with liberals is: They refuse to argue. Liberals' idea of a battle of wits is to say "Bush lied!" in front of adoring college audiences and be wildly applauded for their courage. They're like hack road comics who coax a cheap round of applause out of audiences by declaring, "I just quit smoking!" or "My wife just had a baby!" Without a Roman Coliseum-style audience to give them standing ovations for every idiotic utterance, you get the liberal disappearing act.
At a loss whenever anyone argues back, liberals have a number of stratagems to prevent conservatives from talking. They shout conservatives down; unplug reporters' microphones; edit conservatives' answers in pretaped TV shows (Hardball) to make the conservative look like a monkey; burn student newspapers; and heckle conservative speakers. When John Stossel went to Brown University for a report on "date rape," he was mobbed by angry protesters chanting, "Rape is not TV hype!"--and then his microphone cord was unplugged by an angry student. College dropout Michael Moore put a microphone in Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy's face and asked for his help in getting more members of Congress to send their own family members to fight the war on terror. Kennedy replied that he would love to and that he already had two nephews in the military, one on his way to Afghanistan. Moore's documentary shows Kennedy's image--but cuts his answer from the film.
There is probably no conservative student newspaper in the country that has not been trashed or burned by liberals. Meanwhile, there is no known instance of College Republicans burning or trashing liberal student newspapers. To the contrary, conservatives get a kick out of watching liberals try to thrash their way to a coherent argument ("bush lied, kids died!"). In fact, if it weren't for conservatives with a taste for schadenfreude, literally no one would be listening to Air America--assuming it's still on the air by the time this book hits the stores.
Life was much better for liberals when there were only three TV stations airing precious little news. Back in the pre-cable news days, public political debate consisted exclusively of liberal Democrats debating radical Democrats. Now that conservatives are physically present on cable news, liberals are terrified they might have to respond to a conservative point, so liberals filibuster and interrupt, hoping to never hear it. Turn on your TV right now and you'll see a liberal--probably Julian Epstein--trying to Filibuster his way out of having to respond to a conservative.
If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you said--unless you were, in fact, talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It's like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.
Inasmuch as liberals can only win arguments when no one is allowed to argue back, they enjoy creating fictional worlds in movies and on TV where liberals finally get to win. Remember the Andy Hardy movies? Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland would be headed for disaster--until Andy shouted out, "I tell you what! Let's put on a play!" With liberals, it's "We're losing on the facts! Let's make a movie!"
In movies, liberals are invariably morally and intellectually superior. They are also good-looking, witty, compassionate, and always right--basically Bob Byrd, Jerry Nadler, Al Franken, and Hillary Clinton rolled into one adorable bunch. Only in Hollywood is Robert Redford considered a dead ringer for Bob Woodward, Emma Thompson for Hillary Clinton, Dustin Hoffman for Carl Bernstein, and Andy Garcia for Al Franken. Typically, Republicans are played by hard-boiled B-list types whose only other roles are as cruel high school football coaches or rogue army drill instructors. Reflect on the fact that Anthony Hopkins played both Nixon and Hannibal Lecter.
The only policemen in the universe who are not aware that "cop-killer bullets" have never killed a cop are the ones on Law & Order. Only in liberal fantasy movies like Coming Home is a patriotic hawk the impotent klutz who shoots himself in the foot, and the liberal dove the sexually potent one. Only in Hollywood could a sitcom that parodies a U.S. president and is titled There's My Bush be about George Bush rather than Bill Clinton. (The show was unceremoniously and quietly canceled because of low ratings.) In movies, we always learn that there is no reason, ever, to Fight a war. Unless the Earth is invaded by aliens from outer space with huge scary spaceships and death rays and men of all races and nationalities can unite against a common enemy--like in Independence Day. So if the Earth is ever invaded by hostile aliens from outer space, you won't have to ask liberals twice to take up arms in defense of Planet Earth.
It was inevitable, given what liberals value, that on the popular sitcom Friends beautiful actresses would be depicted hyperventilating over George Stephanopoulos's Fictional manhood when he drops his Fictional towel. Only in the bizarro world of Hollywood can such a harmless little chap as George exude massive sexual potency. On HGTV, the female host of What Not to Wear leeringly jokes about seeing Bill Clinton in a Speedo. In real life, Monica Lewinsky can be heard on tape describing Clinton's executive branch thus: "Think of a thumb." No wonder liberals prefer the world of make-believe.
In addition to all Oliver Stone movies and all Michael Moore documentaries (Oliver Stone Without the Talent!), an extremely abbreviated list of liberal fantasy movies includes:
The Day After Tomorrow (not to be confused with Next Friday, starring Ice Cube)--message: liberals are right about global warming! The hyper-silly disaster epic is based on a book coauthored by UFO/black-helicopter/the-CIA-is-beaming-microwaves-into-my-teeth-fillings guru and late-night AM radio maven Art Bell.
The Cider House Rules--message: liberals are right about abortion! Kindly small-town abortionist (Michael Caine) just wants to help unwed pregnant girls. Disaster strikes when it turns out the young lad taking over Caine's practice (Tobey Maguire) is opposed to abortion because it's "wrong." The lad soon learns the error of his ways after a black teenaged girl from a family of apple pickers is raped and impregnated by her own father and needs an abortion. (You can't remind people too often that most women having abortions were raped by their own fathers.) This Film was a veritable ode to moral relativism and the hideous notion that there are no rules save the ones we make up ourselves as we go along. Shockingly, it only won a single Oscar.
The American President--message: democrats will vote their consciences even if it hurts them politically and all republicans ever do is call people names. In this movie, Michael Douglas plays Bill Clinton as Clinton would like to be--handsome, thin, courageous, liberal, and widowed. The president's top Republican adversary goes on national TV and calls the president's girlfriend a "whore." So it's a plausible story.
Dave--message: liberals are right about federal spending on the homeless! Only the president can put an end to homelessness, and he's got to cut $500 million in pork from the discretionary budget to do so. He finds the money by poring over the entire federal budget (during an "all-nighter") with the help of his tax guy, played by Charles Grodin. (Of course, to do that, the president would need a line-item veto. Now which party, do you suppose, supports a line-item veto and which opposes it?)
Of the dozens and dozens of nonfiction books to come out about the Clinton presidency, only one was made into a movie: The Hunting of the President, by fanatical Clinton apologists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. (Message: liberals were right about Clinton, even if there are only two liberals left defending him!) The intriguing plotline is this: A lot of mean people tried to bring down a great president.
Leaving aside which account most closely resembles the truth, which one of these sounds like a better movie plot:
