by Ann Coulter
Because liberals passionately believe their own myths, this wasn’t the only time they embarrassed themselves in public. Here are a couple of examples in just one week’s time during the 2010 midterms:
After Sarah Palin told a Tea Party crowd to wait for the November election returns before partying “like it’s 1773,” liberals instantly concluded that Palin meant “1776” but was too stupid to know when the Declaration of Independence was signed. PBS’s Gwen Ifill tweeted “Sarah Palin: party like its 1773! ummm,” and the Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas tweeted “Sarah Palin to supporters: ‘Don’t party like it’s 1773 yet.’ … She’s so smart.” These ignorant posts were retweeted by dozens of other liberal geniuses, and the Huffington Post reprinted Moulitsas’s tweet.
It never dawned on the liberal mob that, when speaking to a Tea Party group, Palin might be referring to the year of the Boston Tea Party, which occurred in … yes, that would be 1773. Only if you start with the premise that Sarah Palin is an idiot and therefore if she said something, it must be idiotic, would you not even bother to look up the year of the Boston Tea Party before leaping to the conclusion that Palin meant to cite the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
For liberals, Palin’s speeches are like one of those puzzles in a children’s magazine that say, “Spot the mistakes.” Palin was talking, so she must have made a mistake. The problem was, there was no mistake.
The same thing happened when Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said that the Constitution does not mention a “separation of church and state.” Again, liberals believed their own fairy tales rather than the evidence. They’ve told themselves so many times that “the Constitution clearly provides for a separation of church and state!” no one ever bothered to check.
Whenever liberals talk about “constitutional rights,” they are invariably referring to some pronouncement inserted in an opinion by a rogue liberal judge fifteen years ago, which they now demand we treat as if it came from James Madison’s pen. One thing we know is that terrorists who intend to destroy us must be given civilian trials because that’s what the founding fathers wanted.
Really? Can I see the Constitution?
No, why would you ask?
Hey! That isn’t in the Constitution!
Yes, it’s right here, written in crayon, circa 2006.
Apparently some conservatives took liberals up on the invitation to read the Constitution and saw that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not there.
What liberals meant by “It’s in the Constitution!” was “It was slipped into a Supreme Court opinion around 1950 by Justice Hugo Black, a racist, redneck anti-Papist from Alabama who wanted to make sure no public money would be spent busing students to Catholic schools.” But that doesn’t sound as impressive as “It’s in the Constitution!”
True, the “separation” phrase comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson. He also wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” but you don’t hear conservatives going around citing the “tree of liberty clause” in the Bill of Rights. Like “the separation of church and state,” it’s not in the Constitution.
Indeed, a fair-minded person would look at the language of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—and wonder why it was phrased so clumsily if the idea was to prohibit state involvement in religion. Why not just say, “Neither the federal nor state governments may enact laws favoring religion”?
The answer is: The framers were not only decreeing that Congress could not establish a religion, but also reassuring the states that they could establish religions and Congress couldn’t stop them. Inasmuch as a number of states had established churches both before and after passage of the First Amendment—decades after in some cases—the Establishment Clause obviously didn’t mean the states couldn’t establish religions. To the contrary, Congress was being forbidden from passing a law about the entire subject of—or “respecting”—an establishment of religion. That’s why they used the word “respecting.”
Liberals love to bellow “ ‘No law’ means ‘no law’!” but don’t want to explain why “Congress” doesn’t mean “Congress,” “respecting” doesn’t mean “respecting,” and “establishment” doesn’t mean “establishment.”
Back to Jefferson’s letter: It was written about a decade after the passage of the First Amendment—by a Congress of which Jefferson was not a member, incidentally. He was writing to the Danbury Baptists, who happened to be living in a place where Congregationalism was at that moment the established state religion of Connecticut. But neither Jefferson nor the Baptists objected to that. (The Baptists objected to the dancing—but that’s another story.) Their dispute was about the federal government’s involvement in religion. Even Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” letter referred only to the federal government and assumed states could have established religions.
The invincibly ignorant eye-rolling from the students and professors at the University of Delaware at the O’Donnell-Coons debate suggests that American history is not really touched on by our educational system. I thought they just took the Bible out of public schools, but apparently the history books have been removed as well.
As with the liberals who agreed with one another that Sarah Palin was a moron for mentioning “1773” to a group of Tea Partiers, liberals cited the audible snickers of morons at the O’Donnell-Coons debate as proof that O’Donnell was wrong.
These people would have snickered at Galileo. They would giggle if you told them the millennium didn’t start on January 1, 2000. They would sneer if you told them Albany is the capital of New York. But you’d be right. It doesn’t matter if 99.99999 percent of the people listening to O’Donnell think she’s wrong. She’s right.
But that’s not how a mob distinguishes truth from falsehood. They defer to the crowd. Some students say 2 + 2 = 4, some say it’s 5—let’s have a vote!
As Le Bon says, a mob will believe its own myths even though they “most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.”8
The media have reveled in the one myth believed by more Republicans than Democrats: that Obama was not born in Hawaii, despite printed announcements of his birth that ran in Hawaii newspapers at the time, among other evidence. Congratulations, liberals! I’ve got dozens of myths believed by more Democrats than Republicans.
Which party contained the collection of idiots who believed:
• Sarah Palin’s infant child, Trig, was actually the child of her daughter.
• The Rosenbergs were innocent.
• The conviction of spectacularly guilty Mumia Abu Jamal, arrested while literally holding a smoking gun over the body of the cop he had just shot, was a frame-up.
• Alar on apples causes cancer.
• Power lines cause cancer.
• 150,000 women die of anorexia every year.
• Domestic violence against pregnant women is the leading cause of birth defects.
• Global cooling (circa 1976).
• Global warming (circa 2000).
• The Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper.
• There is a “plastic gun”—that shoots bullets—invisible to metal detectors.
• Emergency room admissions for women beaten by their husbands rise 40 percent on Super Bowl Sundays.
• Justice Antonin Scalia threw the 2000 election to Bush so that his son could get a job with the Labor Department.
• Breast implants cause disease.
• O.J. was innocent.
• Dan Rather had documents proving Bush shirked his National Guard duty. (Hint: Rachel Maddow was one!)
• The Diebold Corporation secretly stole 700,000 Kerry votes in 2004.
• Bill Clinton did not have sex with “that woman.”
• Al Gore didn’t realize he was in a Buddhist temple.
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• Heterosexuals are just as likely to contract AIDS as gays.
• Jim Jones was not a sociopathic cult leader but an inspirational visionary in the mold of “Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, Chairman Mao” (as put by California Democrat Willie Brown).
• John Edwards didn’t have an affair with Rielle Hunter.
• John Edwards’s campaign aide Andrew Young fathered Rielle Hunter’s child.
• Tawana Brawley was raped by policemen and a prosecutor.
• Someone shouted “Kill him!” at the mention of Obama at a Sarah Palin rally in 2008.
• A census worker found dead in the woods of Kentucky with “Fed” painted on his chest was murdered by a right-wing anti-government nut. (The census employee’s death turned out to be a suicide/insurance fraud scheme.)
• Everything that appears in a Michael Moore movie is true.
There you have it: the myth column of the fifth column. What’s so striking about liberal myths is not only how many there are, nor even that they’re given currency by the New York Times and the CBS Evening News and in the House and Senate, but that they’re so laughably implausible. If 150,000 women died of anorexia every year, the hospitals would be overrun with starving women. That’s three times as many people that die in car accidents every year.
Similarly insane was the Left’s terror of plastic guns. A gun couldn’t fire if it was made of plastic. The explosive force of the bullet would shatter a barrel made of plastic or ceramics. There has never been a gun made without using metal for the barrel. The “plastic gun” that liberals claimed could foil metal detectors was the Austrian Glock—which is 83 percent steel. Only the handle and frame of the so-called plastic gun were constructed of a modern polymer, making the Glock lighter and more comfortable to hold.
And yet, in the eighties, Democrats tried to ban the Glock, despite assurances from both the director of civil aviation security for the Federal Aviation Administration, Billie H. Vincent, and the associate director of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Phillip C. McGuire, that “plastic guns” were easily picked up by the most primitive metal detector.9
In response, the Democrats produced some nut in Florida who claimed he had spent seven years drawing … a picture of a plastic gun. Yes, a picture. Liberals were terrified! Democratic representative Mario Biaggi said nonexistent plastic guns were a “triple-barrel terrorist threat,” and Democratic representative Robert Mrazek warned that the nonexistent gun was going to be “the terrorist’s weapon of choice, and certainly we ought to be able to stall it long enough to let technology catch up.”10 I’ve designed an invisibility potion—only on paper, so far. Imagine what the terrorists could do with that!
Then-representative Chuck Schumer demanded that Glocks be outlawed on the basis of unconfirmed reports that Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy had placed an order for more than a hundred Glocks.11 Of course, police forces and gun owners across the United States were ordering them, too, because they’re very comfortable and reliable guns.
Nonetheless, news articles reported, “The administration declined Wednesday to endorse legislation prohibiting the import or domestic sale of plastic handguns that terrorists could slip through airport metal detectors.”12
In the end, Congress passed a bill banning guns with less than 3.7 ounces of metal by a 413–4 vote in the House and a voice vote in the Senate. They might as well have outlawed Martian death rays. Even the Glock contains 19 ounces of metal. The National Rifle Association did not object to Congress banning an imaginary gun. With less toleration for fools, Representative Dick Cheney was one of four congressmen to vote against the ban on a nonexistent gun.
Liberals are like the contestants on Monty Python’s Stake Your Claim, but without the sense to concede the point.
Game Show Host: Good evening and welcome to Stake Your Claim. First this evening we have Mr. Norman Vowles of Gravesend, who claims he wrote all Shakespeare’s works. Mr. Vowles, I understand you claim that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare?
Vowles: (proudly) That is correct. I wrote all his plays and the wife and I wrote his sonnets.
Host: Mr. Vowles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early seventeenth century. How old are you, Mr. Vowles?
Vowles: Forty-three.
Host: Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over three hundred years before you were born?
Vowles: Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.
Host: Ah!
Vowles: There’s no possible way of answering that argument, I’m afraid. I was only hoping you would not make that particular point, but I can see you’re more than a match for me!
MSNBC manufactures bogus stories and pumps them out a mile a minute, while leaping on the slightest misstatement made on Fox News as proof of malice or lunacy. (Thus uniting the mob’s belief in myths and acceptance of contradiction in one dynamite combo platter!)
When the Mississippi River bridge in Minnesota collapsed during rush hour on August 1, 2007, killing thirteen people, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann wildly leapt to the conclusion, on the basis of no evidence, that it was Republicans’ fault. They had callously cut taxes and now people had died.
Forty-eight hours after the collapse, Keith cited the remarks of Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)—whom he called “Governor,” in the sort of misstatement he deems a firing offense if uttered by a conservative—and Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) blaming Republicans for the tragedy. (When something is an actual “tragedy” involving no human will, liberals blame Republicans; when it’s an intentional attack, such as the Tucson shooting or the 9/11 terrorist plot, liberals call it a “tragedy.”)
Klobuchar blamed the bridge’s collapse on “messed-up priorities of spending half a trillion dollars in Iraq while bridges crumble at home.” Slaughter also blamed the Iraq War, calling the people who died in the bridge collapse “almost victims of war” because our “perpetual war depletes the funds available to maintain our infrastructure.”
Maddow laid the deaths of thirteen people directly at the feet of “Republicans, including Governor [Tim] Pawlenty [and] President Bush,” who “have demonized taxes and demonized any Democrat who ever said a tax hike could improve our lives, save our lives at home.” Saying, “there aren’t Republican bridges or Democratic bridges,” Maddow railed: “We’re a country that as a whole is paying this incredible deadly price for a brand of American conservatism that hates and demeans government, and that has defined any sort of spending on anything for the common good as something that’s soft headed and suspect.”
She traced the collapse of the bridge back to Ronald Reagan’s “first inaugural, where he defined government as the problem, and to Barry Goldwater before him, and the Republican Party defends itself as uncritical inheritors of the legacy.”13
All this was two days after the bridge collapsed, before an investigation into the causes had even begun.
A year later, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the bridge collapsed because of a design flaw.14 It had nothing to do with government spending on upkeep of the bridge, it wasn’t corrosion or cracks. It was a design flaw. The Democrats’ demand for more “infrastructure” spending wouldn’t have helped.
After polluting the airwaves with their irresponsible, baseless accusations, liberals never acknowledged that they were wrong, nor did we get an apology from Olbermann, Maddow, Klobuchar, or Slaughter.
In the last year of the Bush administration, terrified that the president would take action against Iran before leaving office, MSNBC and other conscience-of-the-nation types denounced neoconservatives, Zionists, and the right-wing smear machine for insulting the good name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In December 2007 a report was leaked that all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran had ceased nuclear weapons development as of 2003. The leak came after months of warnings from the Bush administration t
hat Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
In October 2007, for example, President Bush had warned, “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”
The only people more triumphant than Ahmadinejad about the leaked report were liberals. In Time magazine, Joe Klein gloated that the Iran report “appeared to shatter the last shreds of credibility of the White House’s bomb-Iran brigade—and especially that of Vice President Dick Cheney.”15
Liberal columnist Bill Press said, “No matter how badly Bush and Cheney wanted to carpet-bomb Iran, it’s clear now that doing so would have been a tragic mistake.”16
Naturally, the most hysterical response came from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. After donning his mother’s housecoat, undergarments, and fuzzy slippers, Keith brandished the NIE report, night after night, demanding that Bush apologize to the Iranians.
“Having accused Iran of doing something it had stopped doing more than four years ago,” Olbermann thundered, “instead of apologizing or giving a diplomatic response of any kind, this president of the United States chuckled.”
Olbermann ferociously defended Mahmoud (a fan of the show) from aspersions cast by the Bush administration, asking if the president could make “any more of a mess” than by chuckling “in response to Iran’s anger at being in some respects, at least, either overrated or smeared.”17 Bush had “smeared” Ahmadinejad!
Most sanctimoniously, Keith said, “Given the astonishment with which President Clinton’s lie about his personal life was met in the media, in the newspapers, where is that level of interest in this president’s lie? That first one was a lie about an intern and maybe some testimony. This is a lie about the threat of nuclear war.”18