Naturally, Godless has provoked liberals to the point of
apoplexy. Instead of fighting the main argument of Coulter’s
book, liberals (and some conservatives) have latched onto
page 103, in Coulter’s fifth chapter. The basic point of
the chapter is that Democrats cannot win the battle of
ideas, and so have chosen to send “only messengers whom
we’re not allowed to reply to. That’s why all Democratic
spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women.”...
...Clearly Coulter isn’t claiming that the Jersey Girls
popped champagne as the planes hit the Twin Towers –
she’s claiming that they have taken advantage of every
available microphone to pose as national security experts,
then claimed the sanctuary of victimhood when attacked
politically.
Thank God for Ann Coulter
Review by Ben Shapiro
Townhall.com
Jun 9, 2006
“Liberals love to boast that they are not ‘religious,’ which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion,” writes Ann Coulter at the beginning of her new tour de force, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
Coulter backs up her provocative thesis with her usual biting wit and cutting humor. Instead of focusing on the presence of leftist bias in the media (Slander) or the left’s rewriting of history in pursuit of its oft-treacherous ends (Treason), Coulter hones in on the basic ideals inspiring the ideology of liberalism. As Coulter strips liberalism down to its bare essentials, it becomes evident that, as she puts it, liberalism “is no longer susceptible to reduction ad absurdum arguments. Before you can come up with a comical take on their worldview, some college professor has already written an article advancing the idea.” Liberalism is indeed a Godless religion—and, as Coulter demonstrates, the secular religion of the left is a religion bereft of moral fiber.
It’s not that the atheism of the secular left makes Coulter unhappy. It’s that they lie about their religion. Jews don’t pretend that Judaism is a scientific theory; Christians don’t pretend that Christianity is provable in a laboratory. Liberals, however, pretend that their religion is provable and intellectually superior, while at the same time labeling the traditionally religious backwards buffoons. “I don’t particularly care if liberals believe in God,” she writes. “In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven. So fine, rage against God, but how about being honest about it?”
Coulter jumps into her expose with alacrity. Her second chapter, “The Passion of the Liberal: Thou Shalt Not Punish The Perp,” reminds us that Coulter isn’t simply a terrific writer who makes it impossible to drink while reading her work (this produces the famed “Coulter milk-out-the-nose phenomenon”). She’s also a legal scholar.
Coulter gives a brief and compelling history of Supreme Court idiocy with regard to criminal law. The absurd 1961 Supreme Court decision Mapp v. Ohio, announcing that the “exclusionary rule” barring evidence obtained “illegally” by police had to be applied on the state level, is one well-deserved target of her pen: “In order to vindicate the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the criminal goes free … This would be like a rule intended to reduce noise during an opera that mandated shooting the soprano whenever anyone in the audience coughed,” Coulter writes.
Coulter continues her devastating evaluation of liberalism’s cult of criminality with her in-depth discussion of the Willie Horton case. Willie Horton, as all political science majors know, is trotted out routinely by leftists in order to show that Republicans are truly racists. (I was treated to a showing of the famed “Willie Horton” commercials by Professor Lynn Vavreck, Political Science 40, UCLA, February 26, 2002.)
The real story is somewhat different.
Willie Horton was a convicted first degree murderer sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole (known as LWOP in legal circles). Michael Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, “lustily” backed the weekend furlough program designed to re-introduce criminals to society. As Coulter points out, LWOP convicts have no need for such re-introduction, since they should never re-enter society. Dukakis felt differently, and under his watch, 82 first degree murderers were furloughed, including Horton.
Horton took off to Maryland, where he proceeded to sadistically torture Maryland resident Cliff Barnes and rape and torture Barnes’ fiancée Angela Miller.
Naturally, this became a campaign issue (first raised by Al Gore) in the 1988 presidential election. Liberals, however, insisted that this issue was only an issue because Horton happened to be black. “The only reason the Democrats cried racism over the Willie Horton ads was that it was one of the greatest campaign issues of all time,” Coulter writes. “Horton was the essence, the heart, the alpha and omega of liberal ideas about crime and punishment, to wit: Release the guilty. Willie Horton showed the American people exactly what was wrong with liberal theories about crime.”
Then there’s the liberal theory about life: it only matters if we’re talking about convicted murders (no, please don’t fry them!), not if we’re talking about unborn innocents (suck ‘em into a sink). Abortion for liberals, as Coulter explains, is “The Holiest Sacrament.” “No matter what else they pretend to care about from time to time—undermining national security, aiding terrorists, oppressing the middle class, freeing violent criminals—the single most important item on the Democrats’ agenda is abortion,” she avers.
There is no doubt that she is correct. Democratic politicians have abandoned every group they purport to support at one time or another—except for feminists who proclaim that abortion-on-demand is a godless-given-right. The Democrats’ undying and unwavering support for abortion-on-demand would condemn them to electoral damnation time after time, so Democrats simply lie about their policy positions.
That’s why liberals require that every single judge pay homage to the “holy writ” of Roe v. Wade, the most ridiculous legal decision in American history. Here’s Coulter: “There’s no there there—there’s nothing to talk about in Roe. Denounce, laugh at, ridicule, attack—yes. Discuss—no.”
Chapter 6 discusses the left’s worship of public school teachers. “Attack the Boy Scouts, boycott Mel Gibson, put Christ in a jar of urine—but don’t dare say anything bad about teachers,” writes Coulter. Coulter concisely explains the salary structure for public school teachers, who make more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians … and the list goes on. At the same time, the quality of our public education system has been consistently declining for decades. “With public schools like this, students are going to learn, if they are going to learn, because of their parents, not because of any inspiration they get from schools,” Coulter rightly states. But because public school teachers’ unions are sacrosanct, the education system must not be reworked; to even suggest reworking the system would imply criticism of public school teachers.
The remainder of the book is dedicated to Coulter’s refutation of the left’s ad hominem and utterly hypocritical attack on the “non-science” of religion.
Religion isn’t science, Coulter says, but neither is liberalism. Liberalism is a religion, pure and simple: “Listening to liberals invoke the sanctity of ‘science’ to promote their crackpot ideas creates the same uneasy feeling as listening to Bill Clinton cite Scripture. Who are they kidding? Liberals hate science. Science might produce facts impervious to their crying and hysterics.”
Measuring IQ (except when liberals have high IQs), mentioning that AIDS almost primarily affects homosexuals and bisexuals (and their spouses), preventing frivolous lawsuits based on junk science (see Edwards, John), DDT use; using adult stem cells (embryonic stem cells are favored, though); breast implants are (well, except for use in pornography)—all are nonsensically opposed by liberals.
Most dear to me, as a Harvard Law student, is Coulter’s take on the bizarre liberal attack on deposed Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who had the audacity to suggest that differences between men and women might not be caused by society, but rather—gasp!—by nature: “These delicate hothouse flowers [female Harvard professors] have a completely neurotic response to something someone else says—and then act like it’s Summers’s fault. Only a woman could shift the blame this way. If I hit you with a sledgehammer, that is my fault. But if I propose a scientific idea and you vomit, I think that’s really more your fault.” Hear, hear!
After compiling the evidence of liberal catechism, Coulter finally turns her bazooka on the foundation of liberalism itself: Darwinism. Coulter systematically picks apart the studies cited in support of species-to-species evolution, which are often religiously-adhered-to forgeries or speculative exercises. “These aren’t chalk-covered scientists toiling away with their test tubes and Bunsen burners,” she writes. “They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true and any evidence to the contrary—including, for example, the entire fossil record—is something that must be explained away with a fanciful excuse, like ‘our evidence didn’t fossilize.’”
But evolution isn’t just a religious theory, Coulter states. There’s a reason that Marx and Hitler relied on Darwinism to bolster their horrific worldviews. Coulter quotes Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he proclaimed that his goal was “to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and the weaker … [in accordance with] the eternal will that rules this universe.” When you take God out of the picture, says Coulter, man becomes just another animal, fighting for survival of the fittest.
Naturally, Godless has provoked liberals to the point of apoplexy. Instead of fighting the main argument of Coulter’s book, liberals (and some conservatives) have latched onto page 103, in Coulter’s fifth chapter. The basic point of the chapter is that Democrats cannot win the battle of ideas, and so have chosen to send “only messengers whom we’re not allowed to reply to. That’s why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women.”
Coulter specifically takes to task the so-called “Jersey Girls,” four liberal partisan widows whose husbands were murdered on 9/11. Here’s the inflammatory passage, in relevant part: “These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them … These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”
Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) responded to this passage thusly: “Perhaps her book should have been called ‘Heartless.'" 2004 Democratic presidential candidate (and Jersey Girl-endorsed nominee) Senator John Kerry (D-MA) likewise stated, “we owe all the 9/11 families Ann Coulter slandered so much more than just outrage. We owe them thanks. And we also owe it to them to put the focus where they originally put it when, in the middle of their grieving, they stood up to demand answers and action from a government that invoked their husbands’ memories for political reasons …”
Really, now. I understand that Hillary doesn’t want to read Godless, and I understand that John Kerry owes a debt of gratitude to the Jersey Girls for cutting him some campaign commercials. Nonetheless, reading the context of the quote might be worthwhile. Clearly Coulter isn’t claiming that the Jersey Girls popped champagne as the planes hit the Twin Towers – she’s claiming that they have taken advantage of every available microphone to pose as national security experts, then claimed the sanctuary of victimhood when attacked politically.
There is no doubt that this is absolutely true.
Kerry proves Coulter’s point when he blabbers on about the debt of gratitude we owe to the Jersey Girls for selflessly subsuming their grief to rip the Bush Administration. Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal has made the exact same point as Coulter (OpinionJournal.com, April 14, 2004):
“Nor can anyone miss, by now, the darker side of this
spectacle of the widows, awash in their sense of victims’
entitlement, as they press ahead with ever more strident
claims about the way the government failed them.”
Yes, Coulter’s language is more direct than Rabinowitz’s. But that’s why Coulter is Coulter. And that’s why Godless is so deliciously good.
Liberalism has run out of ideas, so it seeks to shut down debate. Criminals must be freed because the courts say so. Abortion on demand must be provided because (1) women say so, and you’re not a woman, or if you are, shut up, you haven’t had an abortion and (2) the courts say so. Public education may not be fixed because if you want to fix it, you hate teachers. With regard to AIDS, the environment, stem cell research, and the origins of life, liberals label their own views “science” and those of their opponents “religious bigotry.” And with regard to national security, liberals trot out victims who agree with their point of view – and if you don’t agree, you need to shut up. Ann Coulter won’t shut up. Thank God.
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