The hottest and most controversial book of the year! Find out who really controls the media in America.

"[Ann Coulter] is never in doubt. And that, along with her bright writing, sense of irony and outrage, and her relish at finally hitting back at political opponents (especially in the media) is what makes Slander such refreshing and provocative reading."
--Los Angeles Times

"[Ann Coulter] is a fluent polemicist with a gift for Menckenesque invective . . . and she can harness such language to subtle, syllogistic argument."
--Washington Post Book World

"The most popular nonfiction book in America."--New York Times

"The real value of Slander . . . is not in the jokes or devastating exposés of liberal politicians and their allies, but the serious and scholarly study of just how entrenched the media prejudice is against anyone whose politics are even faintly conservative."
--New York Sun

"Written with a great deal of passion . . . the real source of its strength--and its usefulness--was its painstaking marshalling of evidence . . . More important than [High Crimes and Misdemeanors] because it addresses a much broader issue, and one of lasting significance."--National Review

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Liberals Unhinged

The natives are superficially agreeable, but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth. --Margaret Mead

Political "debate" in this country is insufferable. Whether conducted in Congress, on the political talk shows, or played out at dinners and cocktail parties, politics is a nasty sport. At the risk of giving away the ending: It's all liberals' fault.

As there is less to dispute, liberals have become more bitter and angry. The Soviet threat has been vaporized, women are not prevented from doing even things they should be, and the gravest danger facing most black Americans today is the risk of being patronized to death.

And yet still, somehow, Tom DeLay (Republican congressman from Texas) poses a monumental threat to democracy as we know it. The left expresses disagreement with DeLay's governing philosophy by calling him "the Meanest Man in Congress," "Dangerous," "the Hammer," "the Exterminator," and the "Torquemada of Texas." For his evident belief in a Higher Being, DeLay is compared to savage murderers and genocidal lunatics on the pages of the New York Times. ("History teaches that when religion is injected into politics-the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo-disaster follows.")

Liberals dispute slight reductions in the marginal tax rates as if they are trying to prevent Charles Manson from slaughtering baby seals. Progress cannot be made on serious issues because one side is making arguments and the other side is throwing eggs-both figuratively and literally. Prevarication and denigration are the hallmarks of liberal argument. Logic is not their metier. Blind religious faith is.

The liberal catechism includes a hatred of Christians, guns, the profit motive, and political speech and an infatuation with abortion, the environment, and race discrimination (or in the favored parlance of liberals, "affirmative action"). Heresy on any of these subjects is, well, heresy. The most crazed religious fanatic argues in more calm and reasoned tones than liberals responding to statistics on concealed-carry permits.

Perhaps if conservatives had had total control over every major means of news dissemination for a quarter century, they would have forgotten how to debate, too, and would just call liberals stupid and mean. But that's an alternative universe. In this universe, the public square is wall-to-wall liberal propaganda.

Americans wake up in the morning to "America's Sweetheart," the Today show's Katie Couric, berating Arlen Specter about Anita Hill ten years after the hearings. Or haranguing Charlton Heston on the need for gun control to stop school shootings. Her co-host, Matt Lauer, wonders casually why the federal government has not passed a law on national vacation time. The New York Times breathlessly announces "Communism Still Looms as Evil to Miami Cubans" and Time magazine columnist Barbara Ehrenreich gives two thumbs up to "The Communist Manifesto" ("100 million massacred!").

We read letters to the editor of the New York Times from pathetic little parakeet males and grim, quivering, angry women on the Upper West Side of Manhattan hoping to be chosen as that day's purveyor of hate. These letters are about one step above Tiger Beat magazine in intellectual engagement. They are never responsive, they never include clever ripostes or attacks; they merely restate the position of the Times with greater venom: I was reminded by your editorial that Bush wasn't even your average politically aware Yalie; he was too busy...

 

"Ann Coulter is one of the fiery new breed of conservative commentators who don't worry what the Establishment thinks of them."

 

"Coulter, like her ideological opposite, the late William Kunstler, is obsessed with protecting civil liberties and free speech. But the speech she is trying to protect, which includes every form of controversial political incorrectness . . . is threatened by liberals."

 

"There's nothing artificial about Ann. She has a vision of the Constitution and the government's rightful role in our lives that is much different from the mainstream, and much different from mine, but she represents a significant constituency."

 

"Ann Coulter is a pundit extraordinaire."

 

"One of the twenty most fascinating women in politics."

 

Ann Coulter is an attorney and legal affairs correspondent. Her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, was a New York Times bestseller. She lives in New York and Washington, D.C.


From the Hardcover edition.

 

Slander by Ann Coulter
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