Shelf Life

‘I’M not accusing you of being a I bigot. I’m accusing you of being a fool. … I don’t know if you’re a bigot. I do know you’re a fool.” Thus spake James Carville to conservative columnist Ann Coulter on a recent segment of CNN’s Crossfire shout show—offering eloquent proof of the main thesis of Coulter’s excellent new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown, 256 pp., $25.95). What Coulter contends, and proves through the deployment of massive amounts of footnoted evidence, is that the Left in the United States has been made so sluggish by years of dominance of the mainstream media that it has a great deal of difficulty in making coherent, intelligent arguments; it therefore resorts to labeling—and often libeling— dissenting views as “stupid,” “crazy,” and all manner of other vacant epithets that disguise the absence of any intellectual content in the labeler’s attack.

Any fair-minded observer—one who has no partisan ax to grind for either Coulter or Carville—would have to recognize that Coulter is, at the very least, Carville’s intellectual equal. Her 1998 book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, was probably the best of the anti-CIinton books (and boy, were there many); it was obviously written with a great deal of passion, but the real source of its strength— and its usefulness—was its painstaking marshaling of evidence. The same is true of this new book, which is an even more important work because it addresses a much broader issue, and one of more lasting significance.

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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‘I’M not accusing you of being a I bigot. I’m accusing you of being a fool. … I don’t know if you’re a bigot. I do know you’re a fool.” Thus spake James Carville to conservative columnist Ann Coulter on a recent segment of CNN’s Crossfire shout show—offering eloquent proof of the main thesis of Coulter’s excellent new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown, 256 pp., $25.95). What Coulter contends, and proves through the deployment of massive amounts of footnoted evidence, is that the Left in the United States has been made so sluggish by years of dominance of the mainstream media that it has a great deal of difficulty in making coherent, intelligent arguments; it therefore resorts to labeling—and often libeling— dissenting views as “stupid,” “crazy,” and all manner of other vacant epithets that disguise the absence of any intellectual content in the labeler’s attack.

Any fair-minded observer—one who has no partisan ax to grind for either Coulter or Carville—would have to recognize that Coulter is, at the very least, Carville’s intellectual equal. Her 1998 book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, was probably the best of the anti-CIinton books (and boy, were there many); it was obviously written with a great deal of passion, but the real source of its strength— and its usefulness—was its painstaking marshaling of evidence. The same is true of this new book, which is an even more important work because it addresses a much broader issue, and one of more lasting significance.