by Ann Coulter
After promising to unite us—following the horror of the Reagan years—President Bill Clinton blamed conservative talk radio for Timothy McVeigh.
When Clinton was caught ejaculating on interns, the First Lady of the United States responded by going on the Today show and claiming there was “this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter called Ken Starr and his assistants “sheet sniffing prosecutors,”46 and Geraldo Rivera called Starr an “investigative terrorist.”47 Margaret Carlson compared Clinton’s impeachment to the legal system in Saudi Arabia.
As the Senate began Clinton’s impeachment trial, Ellen Mendel of Manhattan matter-of-factly told the New York Times that she felt “the same despair that she did as a girl in Nazi Germany when the efforts of a stubborn group of leaders snowballed, crushing the will of the people.” (Clinton never got even 50 percent of the country to vote for him.) It was clear, she said, “that the bulldozing campaign by the Republicans will not end.”48
But as soon as George W. Bush became president, the only threat to the republic came from the White House itself. Every White House employee was an evil genius, knee-deep in dark conspiracies and cabals. Bush was the target of almost unimaginable calumnies—the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for people who disable detectors on airplanes. Liberals were more sympathetic to Islamic terrorists than they were toward President Bush.
As Le Bon says, “A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation, which in the case of an isolated individual would not gain strength, becomes at once furious hatred in the case of an individual in a crowd.”49 Little did Le Bon know he was the first to discover “Bush Derangement Syndrome”!
Out of a cast of thousands, liberal financier and convicted felon50 George Soros, former vice president Al Gore, and Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott compared Bush to a Nazi. In the case of Soros, it was unclear if this was meant as a compliment; Soros had helped the Nazis identify Jewish homes in his native Hungary as a boy.51 (Hey, we all have to start somewhere. I was on the safety patrol at school when I was a little girl.)
Bookstores overflowed with anti-Bush books. The paper alone destroyed so many trees that Sting’s musical career was extended a full decade. A novel released in 2004 advocated the assassination of President Bush “for the good of humankind.” A mock documentary depicted President Bush’s assassination as a news event—and went on to win the International Critics Prize at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival (not to mention “Best Date Movie of 2006” by The Nation magazine).
Bush was heartily disapproved of by the world’s most fiendish tyrants—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and Air America’s Janeane Garofalo.
Bush was called a “miserable failure” by Democratic congressman Dick Gephardt, a guy who ran for president two times without anyone noticing. Journalist Helen Thomas said Bush was “the worst President ever … the worst President in all of American history.”52 Forgotten 1950s calypso singer Harry Belafonte—not Louis Farrakhan, I mean the other forgotten 1950s calypso singer who hates America—called Bush “the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world.”53 Time magazine’s Joe Klein said Bush’s foreign policy was one of “arrogance” and his domestic policy “cynical, myopic and cruel.”54 Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, whose last name means “a rude sound effect made with the mouth to mimic a bodily function, used to express disapproval,” called Bush “a devil.”55
With critics like these, no wonder Bush was elected president of the United States twice.
After the Washington Post’s Dana Priest abetted America’s enemies by disclosing the government’s top-secret rendition program—for which she would win a Pulitzer Prize—NPR’s Nina Totenberg said of Bush’s rendition program, “It is the first time in my life I have been ashamed of my country.”56 Liberals spent a lot of time being ashamed of their country under George Bush, even when it later turned out the rendition program was started under President Clinton.57
CBS’s Dan Rather attacked a sitting president on the eve of his reelection with forged documents he used to accuse President Bush of shirking his National Guard duty. When the documents were exposed as phony, Rather attacked the bloggers who exposed the fraud as “powerful and extremely well-financed forces” who decided to “attack” him and destroy his “credibility.”58 Dissent was patriotic, but dissent from CBS News was not.
At a performance on the eve of Obama’s inauguration, hip-hop artist Young Jeezy shouted out, to huge cheers, “I wanna thank two people, I wanna thank the mother f**ker overseas that threw two shoes at George Bush and I wanna thank—and listen, listen—and I wanna thank the mother f**kers who helped dem move their sh*t up out of the White House. Keep it moving bitch because my president is mother f**king black, nigga!” Cheers and applause.59
And thus Obama ushered in a new era of attacking Americans who opposed the president and concluded the era of dissent being patriotic. Overnight, the soi-disant “adversary press” switched from being the people’s watchdogs to the government’s guard dogs. (Except at MSNBC, where they became the government’s lapdogs.)
Opponents of Obama’s health care nationalization were automatically deemed racists, thugs, and lunatics. CNN called them “teabaggers”—a crass sexual reference—as did Democratic senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who also called Obama’s critics “birthers.”60 Senator Chuck Schumer called then–Senate candidate Scott Brown a “far-right teabagger.”61 (Ironically, liberals love actual, sodomitic teabagging, but use the term derisively when talking about ordinary Americans protesting a Democratic president’s policies.) Nancy Pelosi called opponents of ObamaCare “Un-American”—and, again, this could have been a compliment. Speaking of “Un-American,” Harry Reid called them “evil-mongers.” Jimmy Carter said an “overwhelming portion” of the people opposed to Obama’s health care plan were racists.62 (And if there’s one guy who’s got his finger on the pulse of what the American people are thinking and feeling, it’s Jimmy Carter.)
The last time I heard this much race-baiting and crass invective I was … in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago listening to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
As a special bonus, mainstream pop culture—timeless classics such as Law & Order—portrayed Tea Party people as extremely angry, clearly dangerous, secession-leaning nutters who had the air of the Aryan Nation about them and talked like they were in the old movie Sergeant York. (“Ain’t that some kind of foreign name? We don’t cotton to feriners ’round here!”) When Republicans swept Congress in the 2010 midterm congressional elections, MIT professor Noam Chomsky said, “The latest election, a couple of days ago, you could almost interpret it as a kind of death knell for the species.”63
Why had liberals hated Bush again? A normal person, not under the sway of groupthink, would say U.S. presidents are different in important respects, in ways that can help or harm the nation—but not 180 degrees different. It’s not Jesus Christ vs. Josef Stalin. (Except in the case of Martin Van Buren, who may have been Stalin.)
Both Bush and Obama went to Ivy League schools, had traditional families with a wife and two girls, claimed to be Christians, said Islam is a religion of peace, kept Guantánamo open, killed civilians in the war on terrorism, bailed out banks, opposed gay marriage, and sought amnesty for illegal aliens. Their most readily apparent difference is that Obama knows how to pronounce “nuclear” correctly and Bush knows how to pronounce “Pakistan.”
Conservatives probably liked Reagan about 70 to 80 percent of the time, Bush 50 to 60 percent of the time, and Obama 5 to 10 percent of the time (admittedly, mostly when he continued the Bush policies he had campaigned against). With liberals it’s 100 percent burning hatred for Reagan and Bush and 100 percent adoration for Obama—which briefly fell to 98 percent in 2010 when the Justin Bieber movie Never Say Never was released. If you ask the right liberal and he doesn’t
have time to do the math in his head, he’ll tell you that his hatred for Reagan sometimes went up to 120 percent.
Only the mob mentality of the liberal explains such infantile, black-and-white thinking.
Indeed, anyone a liberal doesn’t care for will be compared to the worst monsters of history—as Bush was to Hitler. With no explanation whatsoever, the Washington Post’s Lonnae O’Neal Parker said award-winning author Shelby Steele, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, activist Ward Connerly, and journalist Armstrong Williams reminded her of the groveling slave, Fiddler, from the movie Roots.64 She provided no quotes or positions from the beastly men to explain the resemblance; indeed, the bulk of the passage is about Parker’s sister straightening her hair and watching MTV.
There is a scene [in Roots] where kidnapped African Kunta Kinte won’t settle down in his chains. “Want me to give him a stripe or two, boss?” the old slave, Fiddler, asks his Master Reynolds.
“Do as I say, Fiddler,” Reynolds answers. “That’s all I expect from any of my niggers.”
“Oh, I love you, Massa Reynolds,” Fiddler tells him. And instantly, my mind draws political parallels. Ward Connerly, I think to myself. Armstrong Williams. Shelby Steele. Hyperbole, some might say. I say dead-on.
“Clarence Thomas,” I say to my Cousin Kim. And she just stares at me. She may be a little tender yet for racial metaphors. I see them everywhere.
Parker was so proud of this sparkling gem, she included it in her book, which—like the column—contains not another word about these horrid men, such as, for example, what she didn’t like about them.65 Parker was following Le Bon’s playbook for whipping up crowds: Use images, not words.
In the days before Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown won a Massachusetts special election to replace Teddy Kennedy, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann repeatedly raged that Brown was “an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, sexist, ex–nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”
Three days earlier, Olbermann had never heard of Scott Brown. With the soul of an actress, Keith borrows other people’s opinions, adds the sanctimony and indignation, and delivers speeches in a deep baritone, wearing glasses so morons think he’s a genius. (For the huge segment of Keith’s audience that watched just to laugh at him, his firing was heartbreaking.)
NPR’s Nina Totenberg famously said of Republican senator Jesse Helms, “If there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.”66
We had important Democratic elected officials, Democratic contributors, and Vanity Fair writers calling Bush a Nazi; Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists calling him a devil; network anchors slandering him with dummied documents, and award-winning movies gleefully portraying his assassination. But liberals see a sign at a conservative rally depicting Obama as a monkey and act as if they’re staring into the eyes of Lee Harvey Oswald (who happened to be a communist, by the way).
There are other hard comparisons to be made. Conservatives don’t threaten to leave the country if a Democrat becomes president. Liberals do every four years. In 1992, Barbra Streisand said she’d leave if the first George Bush were reelected and then, in 2000, with stunning originality, a whole slew of liberals made the same threat if Bush’s son were elected—director Robert Altman, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Alec Baldwin (as quoted by his then-wife), and Kennedy press secretary/ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger.67 In 2008, Susan Sarandon said she’d leave if McCain won. The only one to ever leave was Salinger, who was merely moving back to France, though some believe he left out of embarrassment after falling for the Internet hoax that TWA flight 800 had been downed by the U.S. Navy.68
True, these are mostly just actors—except Barbra Streisand, who was a key Gore policy adviser. (In 2000, Streisand told TV Guide that Gore had “called me from Air Force One” for advice, but “I couldn’t take the call. I was in the middle of something.”69 Just as soon as she learns how to spell “Iraq,” she’ll be getting calls from Obama.)70 But the Democrats certainly don’t dismiss them as mere actors. Hollywood celebrities tour with Democratic candidates, headline their fundraisers, record robo-calls, and donate millions of campaign dollars to their campaigns.
The Left’s “blind submission” to their leaders and “inability to discuss” their beliefs—consistent with Le Bon’s characterization of mobs—leads to one of their most peculiar debate gambits: the appeal to authority. They will cite a prominent conservative’s liberal position on the odd issue and brandish it as if that ends the argument. Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens! William F. Buckley supported legalizing pot! Goldwater supported abortion! Case closed, QED, let’s all go home.
Conservatives are always left dumbfounded at the triumphalism of such nonarguments. We like Republicans, we liked many things about Buckley, Reagan, and Goldwater. They’re not God. Not even Reagan.
Only liberals use the sarcastic line “last time I checked” so-and-so is “not a socialist”—as if it matters.
Obama pitched his government takeover of health care by saying Bob Dole and Bill Frist supported it and—“last time I checked they’re not socialist.”71 Democratic congressman Gerald Connolly thought he made a devastating point at a hearing on Obama’s failed economic policies by saying, “By the way, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve bank chairman here in the United States, announced to us last week at a luncheon that he believes the stimulus here is working—and not a wild-eyed liberal, last time I checked.”72 And Democratic strategist Alicia Menendez thought she had cornered O’Reilly when she responded to his question about government spending to the point of nearly bankrupting states like California by saying, “The last time I checked, California had a Republican governor.”73
There are, of course, great men who change the course of history and seem to have the spirit of the divine working through them. Most of our founding fathers are among them. Reagan is among them. We honor them. We view their service with reverence. We don’t have sex dreams about them. We’re not a mob.
THREE
CONTRADICTIONS:
YOU CAN LEAD A MOB TO
WATER, BUT YOU CAN’T
MAKE IT THINK
Liberals’ renowned indisposition to analogies is another classic example of mob thinking. Where normal people see blinding contradictions, liberals see only placid consistency. Le Bon explains that mobs are perfectly capable of holding completely contradictory ideas at the same time because according to circumstances, “a crowd will come under the influence of one of the various ideas stored up in its understanding, and is capable, in consequence, of committing the most dissimilar acts. Its complete lack of critical spirit does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions.”1
Only the Democratic Party could contain a senator who killed a girl at Chappaquiddick—and then spent the rest of his career digging into other people’s pasts.
Only the Democratic Party could lyingly claim credit for the Civil Rights Act—supported by more Republicans than Democrats—while having a former Klansman as their senior senator.
Only the Democratic Party could produce a string of presidential candidates who oppose school choice and vouchers while sending their own children to lily-white private schools.
Only the Democratic Party could hysterically denounce a Supreme Court nominee for allegedly making unwanted sexual advances in the workplace and then applaud a president who was receiving oral sex from a White House intern while discussing deploying American troops with a congressman on the phone. Indeed, only the Democrats could oppose Clarence Thomas, actually block Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg (for marijuana use), and then run Bill Clinton for president.
Only the Democratic Party could produce a junior senator from New York who denounced George Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence as “cronyism”—just six years after her husband, Bill, sold a pardon on his way out of office to Marc Rich.2
Only lib
erals could sponsor college speech codes but say that anyone who doesn’t want to subsidize Piss Christ hates free speech.
Only liberals could love George Soros—convicted of felony insider trading in France3—Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett while claiming to detest Wall Street and “the rich.”
Only liberals could tolerate a windbag like Al Gore lecturing the rest of us about our carbon footprints while he flies his private jet from energy-guzzling mansion to energy-guzzling mansion—just one of which consumes 20 times the energy of the average American home.4
(The alleged myth-busting site Snopes.com claims that that estimate on Gore’s house gives only a “mixture” of truth, because Gore’s Tennessee mansion actually uses—I quote—“more than 12 times the average for a typical household in that area.” Ah! We stand corrected! And how much more compared with the Pentagon? Can’t he move? Wouldn’t you move if you thought you were murdering the Earth with your insatiable energy demands?)
“Liberal” is the definition of people who can’t grasp if/then forms of logic.
Immediately after Jared Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, Americans were lectured on civility by the likes of Keith “the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party”5 Olbermann.
But the media turned to one man more than any other to discuss how rhetoric can lead to violence: Al Sharpton—someone whose rhetoric actually had inspired violent mobs. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Sharpton was interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press, on National Public Radio, on CNN, and repeatedly on MSNBC. The Washington Post ran an op-ed on the shootings by Sharpton.
It was an in-your-face move for the media to turn to Sharpton for counsel as they were blaming “rhetoric” for the Arizona shootings. That’s right, we’re going to have Al Sharpton on to discuss ugly rhetoric that can lead to violence. Do something about it.