Demonic

by Ann Coulter

  Maddow has also tied Republican Senate candidates to the killing of late-term abortionist George Tiller by describing her documentary on the shooting as important because “there are five Senate candidates running right now who have a position on abortion that has never really been seen in mainstream politics before.”9 Apart from “for” or “against,” one wonders what the other positions on abortion might be. (Pro, but feel really bad about it? Against, except in cases where Charlie Sheen might be the father?)

  Claims of “toxic rhetoric” invariably mean a conservative is talking. We just passed this wonderful health care bill and it really debases the tone to hear all this criticism. Liberals are blind with rage that conservatives get to talk now, too. They would prefer to return to a kinder world when there were just three TV networks and no Internet, back when Walter Cronkite told everyone what to believe and liberals didn’t have to win arguments.

  Krugman is not exactly a sardonic bon mot–dropping wit himself. He’s more of an angry, red-faced ranter. His 2008 election-night party included effigy burnings of conservative politicians, according to an admiring profile in the New Yorker magazine.10 Evidently, it’s mocking, rakish wit when liberals burn political figures in effigy, but an incitement to murder when conservatives do it.

  Democratic ex-congressman Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania wrote a column for the New York Times calling for “an atmosphere of civility and respect in which political discourse can flow freely, without fear of violent confrontation.” Just months earlier Kanjorski had called for a Republican candidate to be shot: “That [Rick] Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida. Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him.”11 I’m not from around here, but that sounds like toxic rhetoric to me.

  As much as the media stacked the deck with lies, they still couldn’t win a hand.

  In our next Portrait of Scumbag,* two days after the shooting, former congressman Alan Grayson was all over the networks blaming conservatives for inciting violence.

  Grayson was most famous for the “Taliban Dan” video about his congressional opponent, Daniel Webster, in which Grayson edited Webster’s remarks to precisely reverse their meaning. Webster had told a men’s church group to pick a verse from the Bible that required something of them, such as “Love your wife even as Christ loved the church,” adding “Don’t pick the ones that say, ‘She should submit to me.’ ” Grayson’s campaign ad showed Webster saying only, “She should submit to me,” playing “submit to me” over and over again, and helpfully adding, “Religious fanatics try to take away our freedom in Afghanistan, in Iraq and right here in central Florida.”12

  Appearing on MSNBC two days after Jared Loughner’s shooting spree, Grayson claimed there had been attacks or “threats of attacks” against Democrats “for two years now.” Apparently, it was all gentlemanly disagreement until Obama became president.

  Note how many lies Grayson packs in to prove his point:

  1. “[Democratic Rep.] Tom Perriello is burned in effigy.”

  Big deal—but also, by the way, a lie. One guy thought it would be a fun part of the bonfire, other Tea Partiers objected, so it never happened.13

  2. “Frank Kratovil was hung in effigy.”

  Again: big deal—but it was done by one guy, who was promptly denounced for doing it by the official Tea Party group.14

  3. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz had her initials used for target practice by one of her Republican opponents.”

  Yes, and the opponent who shot at the letters “DWS” went on to lose the primary. The organizer of the event where it happened immediately sent a handwritten apology to the congresswoman and resigned from his position with the local Republicans.15

  4. “[Black congressman] Emanuel Cleaver was spat on.”

  To be fair, that was not a distortion or half-truth. It was a complete lie.

  5. “When you show a picture of someone, use her name, or represent her district and use it with the rifle sight the way Sarah Palin did, that is inexcusable. That is inviting people to commit violence on another human being.”

  Here we have a despicable, sneaky lie. Sarah Palin did not put crosshairs over Giffords’s face. She did not put crosshairs on Giffords’s name. She put crosshairs on a map of Giffords’s district—just like the Democratic Leadership Committee and a million others have done with their political opponents. But notice how Grayson sleazily throws in three alternative claims—crosshairs were put on Giffords’s face, name, or district—just to release the two false allegations into the atmosphere. This is on the order of saying, “Alan Grayson has engaged in child rape, murder, or bad taste.”

  6. “[Michele Bachmann’s comment, she wants her constituents armed and dangerous] that’s over the line.”

  The rest of the sentence was “I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax.” Her full quote was: “But you can get all the latest information on this event, this … a must-go-to event with this Chris Horner. People will learn … it will be fascinating. We met with Chris Horner last week, twenty members of Congress. It takes a lot to wow members of Congress after a while. This wowed them. And I am going to have materials for people when they leave. I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back.”

  She was telling people to arm themselves with information, nothing more.

  7. “So is [Sarah Palin’s statement] ‘don’t retreat but reload.’ ”

  That, also, is a metaphor, you complete moron. But anticipating princess-and-the-pea liberals like Grayson, Milbank, Matthews, and Krugman, nearly a year earlier, Palin had told a political rally, “When we take up our arms, we’re talking about our vote. We’re talking about being involved in a contested primary like this and picking the right candidate, too.”16

  8. “Dan Gainor (ph), a Republican operative, telling people that he paid them $100 to punch me in the nose—that’s all over the line.”17

  That, frankly, is shocking. I would have paid them at least $1,000.

  Well done, Alan! That’s more lies per second than anyone in the history of television!

  And finally, to top off a week of conservatives getting blamed for a left-wing pothead’s shooting spree, a liberal made a death threat to a conservative … at a televised town-hall meeting to discuss the shootings. Liberal J. Eric Fuller, who had been shot in the leg by Loughner the week before, was apparently enraged at a suggestion by Arizona Tea Party leader Trent Humphries that people not politicize the shooting. Fuller screamed at Humphries “You’re dead!” and was arrested on the spot. As he was being dragged from the room by the police, Fuller kept yelling at the crowd, “What’s the matter with you—whores!” according to the New York Times.18

  A month later, during the government union strikes in Wisconsin, Democratic assemblyman and prostitute frequenter Gordon Hintz yelled at Republican assemblywoman Michelle Litjens, “You are F**king dead!”19

  Liberals possess in abundance all the characteristics of mobs identified by Le Bon: “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others besides—which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution—in women, savages, and children, for instance.”20 I would add that liberal mobs are composed of individuals with an unresolved infantile disorder, resulting in humorlessness and rage.

  So it’s particularly irresponsible for the mainstream media and elected Democrats to be ginning up these impulsive, prone-to-violence liberals by accusing conservatives of complicity in murder. We’d prefer it if you’d just make crosshair maps of our contested congressional districts, please. The false imputation of violence to conservatives is far more dangerous than anything Palin has ever done, particularly when processed by the primitive, mob-susceptible liberal brain. If Sarah Palin is inciting people to commit murder, wouldn
’t it be an act of public service to kill her?

  And when the violence comes, liberals will ignore it, defend it as harmless fun or “free speech,” or hoot with laughter about it. Then they will blame it on conservatives. A few years later, the perpetrators will be pardoned by a Democratic president and hired as university professors.

  Liberals cite the killing of abortionists as an example of right-wing violence. For those of you keeping score at home, in the past four decades, abortion foes have killed eight abortion clinic workers, and abortion supporters have killed 53 million unborn babies. That score again, with we’re not sure how much time left to play, is 53 million to eight.

  Besides the numbers, another difference is that fans of unborn babies don’t praise the murders of abortionists or call such attacks a “constitutional right.” To the contrary, every person affiliated in any way with the pro-life movement has roundly condemned all abortion clinic violence, even when the target is a mass murderer like George Tiller.

  But more important, abortion clinic violence should not be filed under “Political Violence” at all. It should be filed under “Things Liberals Won’t Let Americans Vote On.” As upset as liberals were by the Vietnam War, when JFK started that war, he was a president, duly elected by constitutional means—plus a little Daley machine magic. So was LBJ when he escalated the war, as was Nixon when he ended it.

  Liberals invented a constitutional right to abortion out of thin air and, in one fell swoop, withdrew abortion policy from all democratic processes. Wishing very hard for something to be a constitutional right does not make it so. When there is no legal process for pro-lifers to pursue to outlaw abortion—unlike every policy liberals violently protest—some pro-lifers will inevitably respond to lawlessness with lawlessness.

  Noticeably, the first abortion doctor was killed not after Roe, but twenty years later, immediately after the 1993 decision upholding Roe, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In the first few years after Casey, about six more people were killed in attacks on abortion clinics. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle.

  Americans opposed to abortion had spent two decades fighting within the law against a constitutionally groundless decision. They elected two Republican presidents, patiently waited for Supreme Court justices to retire, and fought bruising nomination battles to get conservative nominees on the Court. Then they passed an abortion law in Pennsylvania, which was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. But the Court upheld the utterly fraudulent “constitutional right” to abortion announced in Roe. There were no more constitutional options left to fight judicial tyranny on the little matter of mass murder.

  Thus, abortion clinic violence is more akin to the Tiananmen Square protests in Communist China than any liberal riot in America. Want to stop violence at abortion clinics? Repeal Roe and let Americans vote.

  Conservatives constitute about 40 percent of the population—compared with only 20 percent who are liberals.21 If “both sides” were equally guilty of committing political violence, there would be twice as much political violence coming from conservatives as liberals. Instead, there is none. All the political violence comes from either random lunatics or liberals—to the extent that those categories can be disaggregated.

  *By “scumbag,” I do not mean that Grayson is literally a used condom, I mean he is a piece of garbage wrapped in skin, who lies whenever he talks.

  TWELVE

  IMAGINARY VIOLENCE

  FROM THE RIGHT VS.

  ACTUAL VIOLENCE FROM

  THE LEFT

  Somewhat astoundingly, in the entire nation’s history, there’s never been a presidential assassination attempt by a right-winger. There have been more than a dozen by left-wingers. I wouldn’t mention it—I assume we’re all against political assassinations—except liberals keep warning us about the burgeoning violence on the verge of exploding from the right wing.

  It could still happen, but in the first 222 years of this nation’s history, every single shooting of a national politician has been committed by either a liberal or someone even more deranged than the average liberal.

  Some would-be assassins were simply delusional nuts. Richard Lawrence, a painter who thought he was King Richard II of England, tried to shoot Andrew Jackson because he believed the United States owed him money. John Schrank, inspired by the ghost of William McKinley, tried to kill President Teddy Roosevelt because he was angry about Roosevelt running for a third term. Francisco Martin Duran, a paranoid schizophrenic who believed he was going to become Jesus Christ, shot at some men on the White House lawn during Clinton’s presidency.1

  The rest were political activists, who may have been crazy enough to be left-wingers but were not so crazy as to believe they were King Richard II.

  Actor/peace activist John Wilkes Booth—not to be confused with actor/peace activist Sean Penn—shot President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, because, as he explained in a letter to his family, he was furious with Republicans for foisting the war on the South. He said he loved “peace more than life.” (But he really wanted to direct.)

  Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881, had a long relationship with a utopian commune called the Oneida Community, where free love and communal child-rearing were practiced, kind of like Berkeley.

  Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in 1901, was a socialist and anarchist inspired by a radical speech given by socialist Emma Goldman that same year.

  Giuseppe Zangara, who plotted to kill both Republican president Herbert Hoover and President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, just missed shooting Roosevelt, killing Chicago mayor Anton Cermak instead. Zangara was motivated by his all-consuming envy of the rich and intended to assassinate “all capitalist presidents and kings.” This would have made him an ideal pick for Obama’s cabinet, apart from his habit of shooting elected officials.

  Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a stone-cold communist ever since he read a communist pamphlet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a teenager. Oswald studied Russian and moved to the USSR in his late teens. When his application for Soviet citizenship was declined, he slit his wrists. Oswald married a Russian woman, brought her and their child back to the United States, and planned to escape to Cuba, whiling away his days passing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. In other words, Lee Harvey Oswald was Michael Moore, if Moore didn’t hate guns and wasn’t a fat, disgusting pig.

  Ginned up by publications of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, Oswald first tried to kill Major General Edwin A. Walker, a John Bircher. Oswald next plotted to kill former vice president Richard Nixon, but was waylaid the day Nixon was in Dallas.

  So he shot President Kennedy. Upon his arrest, Oswald immediately called John Abt, lawyer for the American Communist Party, planning to ask Abt to defend him so he could use the trial to showcase his Marxist beliefs. (And who hasn’t used his one phone call after being arrested for murder to make arrangements to share Marxism with the world?)

  Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975, was part of Charles Manson’s countercultural hippie cult. She pulled the gun on Ford because she was incensed about the plight of the California redwood.

  Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Ford because, she said, “the government had declared war on the Left.” (Would that it were so!)

  In the entire history of the nation, only two senators and two congressmen have been assassinated.2 Both the first and the last were killed by Democrats for political reasons, and the other two were killed for nonpolitical reasons.

  The first member of Congress to be assassinated was Republican James M. Hinds of Arkansas. He was killed in 1868 by secretary of the Democratic Committee of Monroe County and Ku Klux Klan member George A. Clark. (This was contrary to initial reports on the Rachel Maddow Show that he had been killed by a right-wing anti-government Tea Par
tier.

  Senator Huey Long was shot and killed in 1935 by Carl Weiss for no political reason, but apparently because Long had targeted Weiss’s father-in-law, a judge, for removal from the bench.

  Senator Robert Kennedy was killed on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian extremist angry with Kennedy for his support of Israel. Sirhan keeps coming up for parole these days and is hoping to be released in time to get his own prime-time show on MSNBC. (It was a strange name for an assassin, unless you think about it.)

  The last assassination of a member of Congress was in 1978, when Representative Leo Ryan was killed by members of Jim Jones’s left-wing cult in Guyana.

  Conservatives, we’re endlessly told, create “an atmosphere of hatred and fear.” This is as opposed to liberals who just go around shooting elected officials.

  Among recent examples of political violence on a massive scale in this country—not rhetorical violence, but real violence—was that committed by the Weathermen and their ilk just a few decades ago. Not only were those people embraced by the establishment, they would be welcome today at any Democratic gathering. America’s current president launched his political career in the home of two such radicals who incited violence, set bombs, praised Charles Manson—and only through their own ineptitude avoided murdering anyone.

  Guess which political group both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI consider the most dangerous in America? Moveon.org? Tea Partiers? The Kennedy family?

  The answer is: environmentalists.

  Citing the $43 million in damage done in the past two decades only by the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, the Southern Poverty Law Center concludes, “Extremists within the environmental and animal rights movements have committed literally thousands of violent criminal acts in recent decades—arguably more than those from any other radical sector, left or right.”3 In 2002, the FBI described the Earth Liberation Front as America’s most dangerous domestic terrorist group.4