http://www.theliberal.co.uk/hitchens.htm

Christopher Hitchens
GODLESS: The Church of Liberalism, by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum /
310pp. / £16.99)

Try sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your
tongue and palate for a while:

"If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would
have stuck by him, too."

http://www.theliberal.co.uk/hitchens.htm

"If Hitler hadn't turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would
have stuck by him, too."

http://www.theliberal.co.uk/hitchens.htm

Christopher Hitchens
GODLESS: The Church of Liberalism, by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum /
310pp. / £16.99)

Try sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your
tongue and palate for a while:

"If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would
have stuck by him, too."

Well, I am being paid to parse and ponder that statement and I don’t
understand it, either. Does it intend to say that liberals loved
Hitler but drew the line at his invasion of the Soviet Union? Should
it, rather, be interpreted as meaning that liberals were in love with
Stalin but jumped ship when he was attacked by Hitler? It is
remarkable to find so much intellectual and syntactical chaos in an
assertion that contains no more than fifteen words.
But then, I have the distinct feeling that people do not buy Ann
Coulter’s creed-screeds and speed-reads in order to enhance their
knowledge of history or their command of syllogism. She has emerged as
a persona because she has mastered the politics of resentment, and
because she can combine the ideology of Human Events (the obscure ‘Joe
McCarthy was right’ magazine) with the demand of the chat-show bookers
for a tall blonde with a very rapid delivery on a wide range of
subjects. The cover of this book – which follows the success of its
forerunners Treason and Slander: titles that require little
elucidation – shows her in a low-cut black dress with a prominent
crucifix dangling over a modest cleavage. The needs of showbiz
notwithstanding, I cannot fathom the reason for this slight
come-hitherishness. Miss Coulter is not married and ought therefore,
by her own loudly-proclaimed standards, to be a virgin and to remain
so until further notice.
I used to know her slightly during the days when we both
believed, for different reasons, that Bill Clinton was unfit to be
President. I well remember her shock and anguish when Paula Jones,
whose lawsuit had initiated the impeachment meltdown, posed in the
buff for an inexpensive men’s magazine. I took the view that even a
bad girl has the right not to be crudely importuned by her politician
boss, but Miss Coulter seemed deeply and genuinely shocked: she had
believed all along that Paula was a fragrant young thing, quite
innocent of the vile nature of the male animal; and it is this
innocence of her own, I think, for which she attempts to compensate by
adopting a tough-guy (yes, I do mean to say ‘guy’) manner.
Here is another instance of the sheer incoherence that results
from a mixture of feigned rage and low sarcasm:

If liberals are on Red Alert with one born-again Christian in the
cabinet of a Christian president, imagine how they would react if
there were five. Between 25 and 45 percent of the population calls
itself “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian. Jews make up less than
2 per cent of the nation’s population, and yet Clinton had five in his
cabinet. He appointed two to the Supreme Court. Now guess which
administration is called a neoconservative conspiracy? Whether Jews or
Christians, liberals are always on a witch hunt against people who
appear to believe in God.

Again, and quite aside from its junk statistics (that space “between
25 and 45 per cent” appears to involve quite a margin of error) and
its junk statistical comparisons (does Coulter really want me to name
all the Jews who serve on President Bush’s foreign-policy team?), this
passage seems to license the ultra-left and ultra-right innuendo that
the terms ‘neoconservative’ and ‘Jew’ are interchangeable. The
intellectual disgrace of this is self-evident, and so is its vulgar
ignorance: say what you will about Leo Strauss, he did not even
“appear” to believe in any deity. More noticeable, though, is the way
that the abject confusion, with its resounding non sequitur of a
concluding sentence, impels her to the negation of her own supposed
“argument”. These are the pitfalls that are set by spite and by haste,
and Coulter topples leggily into them every time.
Since her books always pull enough of a crowd to put them on
the bestseller list, the editors and fact-checkers at her publishing
house evidently go on vacation when the manuscripts float in. For all
her show of biblical learning, she does not know the meaning of the
word “shibboleth”, for example. She attacks those who seek “the
removal of ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance”, when the case
is that the Pledge should be restored to its original form, which did
not include those two words. Are not conservatives supposed to
manifest great respect for ‘original intent’? And then there’s the
crass choice of words:

If Democrats ever dared speak coherently about what they believe, the
American people would lynch them.

Leave aside the fact that most of what Coulter adduces is taken
straight from the very mouths of Democrats who are coming right out
with it, and notice the clumsy elision that interchanges “liberal”,
“Democrat” and “Left”(and skip over the unironic use of the word
“coherently”), the term to avoid here would have been “lynch”. Never
to be employed flippantly, this expression has a real-time and
real-life significance, which was felt very onerously in quite recent
memory. Its disappearance, and the abolition of what went with it, is
admittedly not due to “Democrats”, who ran Dixie as a private fief for
far too long, but does redound very much to the credit of those
American liberals and – even worse! – leftists who provided most of
the energy of the Civil Rights movement. The umbrella group in this
campaign was even called the ‘Southern Christian Leadership
Conference’, not that this prevented many secularists and atheists
from participating in it. Finally, I think we can safely say that Dr
Martin Luther King “appeared” to believe in god. So, slice it as you
will, Coulter finds herself inventing new ways in which to be wrong.
As it goes on, the book begins to seem more like typing than
writing, and its demonstration of the relationship between poor
language and crude ideas becomes more overt:

Assuming you aren’t a fetus, the Left’s most dangerous belief is their
adoration of violent criminals.

Well, as I try to teach my students, if you write that “as a young
man, my grandmother used to read to me”, you slightly insult your
grandmother by stating that she used to be a young man. It’s not that
hard to make the assumption Coulter demands here – that you are
neither the Left nor a fetus – but the dangler is complemented in the
same sentence by an inability to associate a singular Left with its
supposed adoration of violent criminals. Some right-wingers has a
marked tendency to make this mistake.
Shall I be fair? Coulter was trained as a lawyer, and she does
have an understanding of the rules of evidence. There is one quite
strong passage where she exposes, with some forensic wit, the bogus
claims made by the conceited Joseph Wilson about his dealings with
Niger. Just for once, she mostly lets the record speak for itself, and
thus allows the indictment of those liberals who fell for Wilson to
occur, as it were, naturally. With the help of some (generously
acknowledged) right-wing clippings-services and quote-providers, she
has no difficulty in highlighting various jaw-dropping remarks made by
feminists, ‘pro-choice’ types, Hollywood narcissists and the more
Malthusian ‘environmentalist’ faction. She re-opens the case of Willie
Horton, the exploitation of whose story has become a fetish among
liberals, and forces the reader to reconsider. If it matters, I am
with her on the tepid climate of moral and political relativism which,
while it wants all children to do equally well at exam time, also
regards the United States as no worse than the Taliban and thus, by an
unspoken logic, as no better. But a polemic against this mentality
cannot really be written by a McCarthyite.
The closing chapters are lifted from the brief submitted by
the absurdly-named ‘intelligent design’ school to a recent trial in
the town of Dover, Pennsylvania. Not so long ago, when the voice of
liberalism was muted, the ‘Creationists’ – to give them their correct
name – sought to forbid the teaching of evolution. Now that they no
longer feel confident enough to impose themselves in this manner, they
have fallen back on a spurious ‘equal time’ plea, whining that
pseudo-science should be taught, in the name of ‘fairness’, alongside
the real thing. In the Pennsylvania case, as in other recent trials in
Ohio and Kansas, not only were the Creationist members of the school
board thrown out by voters, but it was decided by the courts that the
proposed teaching of ‘intelligent design’ was (a) a violation of the
United States Constitution; and (b) a fraudulent waste of time for
both teachers and judges. (By the way, it seems to me that these
outcomes ought to alter the picture, beloved by so many European
liberals, of the United States as a wasteland of fundamentalist
knuckle-draggers). Coulter, the super-patriot and flag-waver, is a
true reactionary in that she yearns for the time when the keyword of
her title, as in ‘Godless Communism’, was a mantra for the
simple-minded. In a world where the true enemies of civilization are
much, much more godly than the blonde goddess of the hard Right,
Coulter is reduced to a blitzing of soft civilian targets – one
redeemed only by its built-in tendency to fall so wide of the mark.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent
book is ‘Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography’.

http://www.theliberal.co.uk/hitchens.htm

Christopher Hitchens
GODLESS: The Church of Liberalism, by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum /
310pp. / �16.99)

Try sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your
tongue and palate for a while:

"If Hitler hadn�t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would
have stuck by him, too."