by Ann Coulter
Ashcroft was repeatedly called a fascist—in the pages of The Nation magazine, by elderly protesters at Ashcroft’s speeches, and in college faculty lounges. Handgun Control Inc. compared Ashcroft’s positions to those of “convicted mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh,” and the Los Angeles Times ran a cartoon with Ashcroft in the white robe and hood of a Klansman.50 Presidential candidate Howard Dean proclaimed that Ashcroft was “not a patriot” and, of course, compared him to Joe McCarthy.51 John Edwards accused him of trying “to take away our rights, our freedoms, and our liberties.”52 Legendary New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis compared him to Osama bin Laden.53
All in all, it was the worst celebrity roast I’ve ever attended.
How about we compare Ashcroft to Janet Reno? It’s not as if you have to go back to the Garfield administration to find an attorney general who was arguably worse than Ashcroft. Let’s look at the attorney general he succeeded.
Attorney General Reno’s military-style attack on a religious sect in Waco, Texas, led to the greatest number of U.S. civilians ever killed by the government in the history of the United States. The sect’s leader, David Koresh, may have run a weird cult, but that falls under “I don’t approve,” not “This is a threat to the domestic tranquillity of the nation.” Reno wanted to target religious fanatics, and the ATF wanted a military confrontation as a demonstration of their manliness, so Americans had to die.
More Americans were killed at Waco than at any of the various markers on the Left’s via dolorosa—more than at Kent State (4 killed), more than as a result of the Haymarket Square prosecutions (4 executed), more than at Three Mile Island (0 died).
SCORE
• American civilians killed by Ashcroft:
0
• American civilians killed by Reno:
80
As Dade County (Florida) state attorney, Janet Reno made a name for herself as one of the leading witch-hunters in the notorious “child molestation” cases from the eighties, when convictions of innocent Americans were won on the basis of heavily coached testimony from small children. In 1984, Reno’s office charged Grant Snowden with child molestation and convicted him of molesting a child, who was four years old when the abuse allegedly occurred seven years earlier. Snowden, the most decorated police officer in the history of the South Miami Police Department, was sentenced to five life terms—and was imprisoned with people he had put there. He served twelve years before his conviction was finally overturned by a federal court in an opinion that ridiculed the evidence against him and called his trial “fundamentally unfair.”
In a massive criminal justice system, mistakes will be made from time to time. But Janet Reno put people like Snowden in prison not only for crimes that they didn’t commit—but for crimes that never happened. Such was the soccer-mom-induced hysteria of the eighties, when innocent people were prosecuted for fantastical crimes concocted in therapists’ offices.
SCORE
• Innocent people put in prison by Ashcroft:
0
• Innocent people put in prison by Reno:
at least 1 that I know of
On August 19, 1991, rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death in Crown Heights by a black racist mob shouting, “Kill the Jew!” as retaliation for another Hasidic man killing a black child in a car accident hours earlier. In a far clearer case of racial jury nullification than the first Rodney King verdict, a jury composed of nine blacks and three Puerto Ricans acquitted Lemrick Nelson Jr. of the murder—despite the fact that the police found the bloody murder weapon in his pocket and Rosenbaum’s blood on his clothes, and that Rosenbaum, as he lay dying, had identified Nelson as his assailant.
The Hasidic community immediately appealed to the attorney general for a federal civil rights prosecution of Nelson. Reno responded with utter mystification at the idea that anyone’s civil rights had been violated. Civil rights? Where do you get that?
Because they were chanting “Kill the Jew,” Rosenbaum is a Jew, and they killed him.
Huh. That’s a peculiar interpretation of civil rights. It sounds a little harebrained to me, but I guess I could have someone look into it.
It took two years of nonstop lobbying from the date of Nelson’s acquittal to get Reno to bring a civil rights case against him.
SCORE
• Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Ashcroft:
0
• Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Reno:
at least 1
Janet Reno presided over the leak of Richard Jewell’s name to the media, implicating him in the Atlanta Olympic park bombing in 1996, for which she later apologized.
SCORE
• Number of Americans falsely accused of committing heinous crimes by Ashcroft:
0
• Number of Americans falsely accused of committing heinous crimes by Reno:
1
Reno also seized young Elián González from his Miami relatives to forcibly return him to his sperm-donor, illegitimate father living in Castro’s Cuba.
SCORE
• Number of six-year-old boys seized at gunpoint and deported to communist dictatorships by Ashcroft:
0
• Number of six-year-old boys seized at gunpoint and deported to communist dictatorships by Reno:
1
In what factless, rationality-free universe is Ashcroft a civil liberties nightmare while Janet Reno represents the golden age of attorneys general? From the phony child-abuse cases of the eighties when Reno was a Miami prosecutor to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious violations of Americans’ basic civil liberties in the nation’s history. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing attorneys in the Bush administration in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, but of liberal Democrat Janet Reno, serving in peacetime.
The Left’s estimation of Ashcroft versus Reno goes well beyond simple partisanship. It would be as if conservatives obsessively denounced President Obama as the worst public speaker ever to sit in the Oval Office, while demanding that everyone acknowledge Bush as a modern-day Demosthenes.
To maintain that sort of contradiction in one’s mind is pathological. It is the pathological response of a crowd, as described by Le Bon—the “incapacity to reason,” “absence of judgment,”54 and “complete lack of critical spirit”55—that permits such wild contradictions and “does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions.”56
A liberal is a person who:
• worships President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who carpet-bombed German cities and executed an American-born spy captured on U.S. soil after a secret military trial—but screams that Bush was guilty of war crimes;
• is crazy about Michael Moore—but against child obesity;
• tapes over the sign that said “Too Many Jews at Harvard” with a sign that says, “Ethnic Quotas This Way”;
• is enraged with Karl Rove for releasing the name of a CIA paper-pusher (which he didn’t do)—but are copacetic with WikiLeaks putting hundreds of thousands of classified national security documents on the Internet;
• categorically opposes the death penalty for convicted murderers—but venerates it as a “constitutional right” for innocent, unborn babies;
• hysterically opposed taking out Saddam Hussein, a mass murderer who gassed his own people and presided over “rape rooms”—but weepily demands that we intervene in Rwanda for humanitarian reasons;
• claims to be pro-children—but supports the public schools;
• champions women’s and gay rights—but ignores the brutal treatment of women and gays by Muslims;
• same sentence as above, except take out the words “gay” and replace the word “Muslims” with “Bill Clinton”;
• claims it was a vicious slander to be called a communist in the fifties—but didn’t see anything wrong with being a communist in the fifties;<
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• advocates unfettered scientific research and debate—but then, with no evidence, simply declares discussions about evolution and global warming closed;
• says women should be treated like men—but then demands a vast network of speech laws that assume women are hothouse flowers;
• yelps for clean, alternative energy—but violently opposes nuclear power;
• supports sustainable energy sources like offshore wind farms—unless the offshore wind farm obscures his view from Cape Cod;
• decries stereotyping—but when a black conservative comes along denounces that person as “unqualified,” “stupid,” a “house nigga,” “an Uncle Tom,” or “window dressing”;
• believes Tea Partiers are terrorists—but Islamic jihadists are victims;
• as mayor of New York City, closes off streets to traffic, clogs the remaining streets with bike lanes to be “green”—and then takes off in one of his two Gulfstream jets to London.
This welter of contradictions doesn’t even embarrass liberals. Why? Because they are a mob.
FOUR
CRACKPOT CONSPIRACY
THEORIES—
OR, AS LIBERALS CALL
THEM, “THEORIES”
Mobs are particularly susceptible to myths. Le Bon says, “The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversion that events undergo in the imagination of a throng.”1
Ask any liberal if Sarah Palin boasted of her foreign policy experience by saying, “I can see Russia from my house.” In real life, Palin had responded to Charlie Gibson’s question about the proximity of Russia to Alaska by remarking that Russia could “actually be seen from Alaska.” The “I can see Russia from my house!” line was from a Saturday Night Live sketch. But facts are irrelevant to liberal beliefs.
Then in 2010, there were two famous videos, run on TV over and over again, that showed one thing, with liberals demanding that everyone admit the videos showed something else. It was like watching North Korean TV.
The first video was of several black congressmen walking through an anti-ObamaCare protest at the Capitol in March 2010 before the final health care vote. The media neurotically reported that the civil rights hero John Lewis was spat at and called the N-word fifteen times on the video—although the videos of the congressmen walking through the protest showed no such thing. Finally, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of any black congressman being called the N-word once, much less fifteen times, at a protest crawling with video cameras and reporters hungry for an act of racism. (Also, the charge of using the N-word fifteen times was ridiculous on its face. Have you ever stood in front of someone calling them the N-word fifteen times? Believe me, it’s not easy. After a while they start finishing the word for you, and next thing you know they’re rolling their fingers and doing that “yada yada N-word yada” thing. It’s a nightmare.)
At that point, TV anchors began claiming they had seen it—but, strangely, could never manage to locate the video in order to show it to their viewers. After quoting a guest on Larry King Live (me) who had said, “If you can show somebody saying the N-word, well then you can win $100,000 if you can produce that tape, because there is no tape of it.” CNN’s Don Lemon said that was a lie and he had seen the tape with his very own eyes and would get it up on air so his viewers could see it for themselves:
Lemon: OK. Listen, we have the tape here on CNN. I saw it on CNN’s State of the Union.… So the tape is there and we’ll try to get it on CNN so that you can see it and we’ll highlight it the same way that Candy Crowley did.
I guess Don’s producers couldn’t find the tape before the end of his program, or the end of the week, the month, or the year, since it’s never been shown on CNN or any other TV network. Damn it! If only TV stations had some mechanism to show videos to their viewers … To this day, the $100,000 reward remains unclaimed.
After weeks of liberals denouncing ObamaCare protesters for calling Representative Lewis the N-word—which never happened—no one, not one TV anchor, reporter, or commentator, ever apologized for this vicious lie. We just stopped hearing about black congressmen being called the N-word for a while.
But then time passed and most people forgot that when challenged, liberals had backed away from their claim that Tea Partiers had spat at black congressmen and called him a racial epithet. So liberals went right back to citing it as a fact again. After Jared Loughner shot up a Tucson Safeway, former congressman Alan Grayson went on MSNBC and reeled off a list of right-wing violence, including that a black congressman “was spit on.”2
In October 2010, a crazed liberal woman in a wig charged Rand Paul as he arrived for a Senate debate. The disguised woman, Lauren Valle, was blocked by Paul’s supporters, who, not being members of SEIU, did not immediately beat her up. Consequently, Valle was able to break away and make another mad dash for the candidate. When Paul’s supporters stopped her a second time, she collapsed to the ground in the famous liberal “You’re hurting me!” routine. This time, one of Paul’s supporters—and my new bodyguard—Tim Proffit, jammed his foot on her shoulder, saying, “Now, stay down.”
Inasmuch as the last ten seconds of the woman’s performance was replayed one million times on television, it was perfectly obvious that Proffit had stepped on her shoulder, not, as TV anchors kept claiming, “stomped” on her “head.” Perhaps there was another video showing the head-stomping, but—as with the N-word video—TV anchors never managed to get that one on air. Maybe Proffit stomped on her head. Maybe he pulled out a gun and shot her. Maybe Lauren Valle stomped on Rand Paul’s head. Unfortunately, we don’t have any footage indicating that any of that happened.
But type in “rand paul” on Google, and the first two “suggestions” from Google are: “rand paul” and “rand paul head stomp.” Such media mistakes are never made in the other direction. No wild misstatement of fact ever gets circulated that makes liberals look worse or conservatives look better. There would never, for example, be a widespread lie that instead of stepping on her shoulder, the Paul supporter had accidentally tapped her shin with his foot.
In 2010, John McCormack of the Weekly Standard—an actual reporter with press credentials—was merely trying to ask Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley a question when he was assaulted and knocked to the ground by an operative with the Democratic National Committee.3 If Lauren Valle’s “head” was “stomped,” then McCormack was knifed. But we didn’t hear a peep about that assault.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann won the prize for best imitation of a North Korean talk-show host, calling Rush Limbaugh a “damned liar” for claiming Valle’s shoulder was merely stepped on—as the video ran showing her shoulder being merely stepped on:
Olbermann: The bronze to Tokyo Rose Limbaugh, rationalizing the assault on Lauren Valle by lying about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
Rush Limbaugh: … [N]ow in the video that AP itself posted, the man put his foot down on her shoulder in what looked to me like an effort to help restrain her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Olbermann: You’re not only a damned liar, Limbaugh, you’re a damned bad liar. 4
That’s ideology trumping the process of your five senses. As Le Bon says, the “simplicity and exaggeration of the sentiments of crowds” result in the crowd’s knowing “neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence.”5
MSNBC was also Hoax Central for the claim, during the 2008 campaign, that someone in the crowd had yelled “Kill him!” in reference to Obama at a Palin campaign rally. Olbermann spent most of October 2008 issuing blistering denunciations of John McCain and Sarah Palin based on this absurdity. “There’s a fine line between a smear campaign and an incitement to violence,” Olbermann lectured. “If Senator McCain and Gover
nor Palin have not previously crossed it, this week, today even, they most certainly did.”
Guest-hysteric Richard Wolffe, then of Newsweek, said it was “no excuse” that Palin couldn’t hear what the crowd was shouting, because “what you’re seeing here is a very conscious attempt to paint Obama as un-American, as unpatriotic and, yes, consorting with what they call ‘domestic terrorists.’ ” (Liberals reject the label “domestic terrorists” for former Weathermen, preferring to call them “future Cabinet members.”)
After beating the “Kill him!” story to death, Olbermann delivered one of his prissy “Special Comments” about the nonincident, demanding that McCain stop campaigning. He railed, “Suspend your campaign now until you or somebody else gets some control over it. And it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.” Anything else, Keith? Should I just concede the election now—or would next week be all right? While I’m up, can I get you a sandwich? How about a hot towel?
As has now been conclusively established, no one ever shouted “Kill him!” at a Palin campaign rally. The Secret Service takes even frivolous threats against a presidential candidate seriously. In 1997, for example, the Secret Service searched the apartment of a student journalist at Berkeley for writing a column about the upcoming football game against Stanford that included the line “Show your spirit on Chelsea’s bloodied carcass, because as the Stanford Daily lets us know, she is just another student.”6
Needless to say, the Secret Service undertook a complete investigation of the claim that someone at a Palin rally had shouted “Kill him!” on hearing Obama’s name. They listened to tapes of the event, interviewed attendees, and interrogated the boatloads of law enforcement officers who had been spread throughout the crowd. The Secret Service’s conclusion was: It never happened. As even an article on the left-wing site Salon noted, “The Secret Service takes this sort of thing very, very seriously. If it says it doesn’t think anyone shouted ‘kill him,’ it’s a good bet that it didn’t happen.”7