Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

The danger, of course, of naming a book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, as Ann Coulter has done, is that you're inviting people to check out your own accuracy. And, unfortunately, in Coulter's case, that was a big mistake.

That's why The Weekly Standard, right wing but with integrity, panned the book.

Let's start with the very title. Coulter named it "Slander," but, of course, what she means when speaking about the media, whether print or electronic, is "libel." Sloppy? Just a preview of things to come.

Coulter slams "liberal" newspapers for using the term "Christian right" and "religious right." She says that shows the evil of the mainstream press. But she's so lazy that she never ran a Nexis search on the term. If she show more had, she'd realize that The Washington Times uses the same term all the time.

Coulter contends that Maureen Dowd attacked Tom DeLay for his religiosity in a June 20, 1999, column. In fact, the object was Al Gore. Sloppy? Par for the course.

I'm not going to go into Coulter having to backpedal on her charges against Katie Couric, even on the puffball kind of interview she was subjected to on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor on July 11, 2002. More serious is how incredibly lazy she was in putting this book together. She laments on the hard time George W. Bush got in campaign 2000. A Nexis search for 1999 and up to the election in 2000 reveals that The New York Times had two stories mentioning Harken Energy. Gee, that was probing! No major newspaper investigated Bush's 1976 DUI conviction in Maine until a smalltown paper broke the story late in the campaign. They were just as lazy -- well, just as lazy as Coulter! Who did a story on Bush's being AWOL from his Air Guard commitment for a 17-month period in the early 1970s? Well, except for The Boston Globe, no one uttered a peep until days before the election. The "liberal" media certainly didn't put Bush under the same microscope as Bill Clinton, whose Vietnam woes surfaced early in 1992.

But then the well-funded right-wing media network isn't interested in exposing Bush's faux pas. Oops! Coulter maintains that there is no Richard Scaife-funded media machine. She'll be writing next that the world isn't round.

That's why she conveniently left this episode out of her book: In February 2001 at a media panel, Paul Begala noted that, on Nexis, he "found 3,641 stories about Bill Clinton 'dodging the draft' ...and there were 49 stories about Bush and the National Guard."

A lot of people think Coulter twists facts. She does, of course, counting on the fact that most people don't have access to Nexis to double-check her sources. But, mostly, she's too lazy to research and, therefore, relies on her own prejudices to fill out a book.

Do women get a harder time about looks in the media, as Coulter contends? Of course, they do. But it's been N.O.W. and Ms. magazine who make that point -- not the Independent Women's Forum that gave Coulter her start. An IWF, by the way, that's funded by none other than that non-existent right-wing conspiracy. show less

As a child, I saw the tome as something that was perennial. Raised in house full of classics, I had a distorted view of what the written text, 'a book' implied.
Modern books on politics really do much to have proven this childish notion wrong. Nothing in this, or any book similar, have any lasting values. If this book is still remembered twenty, thirty years from now, I will be shocked.
As for Coulter and her opinions, they did give me a hard laugh. And it did do much to prove a very Liberal point; that if you control your standards of definition, you can never be wrong. Alas, until the world agrees with your definitions, you can never be correct either.

I've seen Ann Coulter on television numerous times and her speaking style is very tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, so is her writing style. It was difficult to tell whether she was trying to be funny or seriously driving a point home.

This was a very informative book. A lot of good information about book publishers and print media in general. It's been several weeks since I read the book so I can't point anything out specifically. I can say that there were a lot of times I had to put the book down and say , "Huh, I never knew that" or "Wow, I hadn't thought of that perspective before."
I would definitely recommend this book to those who want an insight on how the Left hypocritically slams the Right.

But first, try to check out Ann on show more television or on radio so you can get a feel for her style. It will help when you read the book. show less

Anne Coulter is entertaining, smart and overbearing. Howver, she's preaching to the choir here.

Ann Coulter a conservative commentator and author that argues that liberals control the mainstream media and use it to demonize conservatives and conservative values. Coulter identifies a "liberal catechism" that includes "a hatred of Christmas, guns, the profit motive," and free speech. The some of the language in this bestseller is strong. Her writing is also witty and factual. If you are an American voter, you should read this. Judge the book after you read it and not the author before you do.

Coulter's style (in writing and speaking) is obviously over-the-top, but worth a read for those who don't regularly watch FOX News. I'm for keeping an open mind and balancing the obvious spin of both liberals and conservatives--somewhere between the two is the real truth.

Such camaraderie of nincompoops! Coulter can’t impede scripting her dumbfuck judgments whereas I cannot halt my viewing.