God Help Me

Yes. I actually read Ann Coulter’s latest book.

By Bryan Collinsworth

I made it all the way to page 145 of Godless: The Church of Liberalism — a little more than halfway through the book — before Ann Coulter finally managed to piss me off.

What I scratched into the margin of that page in the heat of that moment cannot be reprinted (even in a publication as hip and youth-oriented as this one). Let’s just say that mocking Nicholas Kristof for his coverage of the genocide in Darfur as a means of propping up Bill O’Reilly’s mindless blather is seriously messed up.

If there’s anything that might redeem Coulter’s words there, it’s that they’re also the most apt illustration of the central problem with her latest work.

You see, I wouldn’t even have bothered to read Godless, except that the subtitle and opening paragraph made me think she might be onto something. Coulter purports to expose "The Church of Liberalism," revealing that despite any claims of secular enlightenment, "liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe."

As a onetime lefty organizer who has been more than a little disturbed by the nearly identical fashion tastes, food selections, car choices, hairstyles, body types, words, actions, and innermost thoughts of liberals separated by thousands of miles of physical space, I thought I might be able to sympathize with Coulter’s insights here.

I was wrong. I can’t commiserate with Coulter because she hasn’t the slightest interest in making an honest or coherent point — even if it’s the rather damning point that the antics of the left can indeed often rival the absurdities of the religious right.

No, Coulter makes disappointingly few observations to this effect in Godless. While she halfheartedly alludes to her purported “religion of liberalism” thesis in her chapter titles and a few one-liners here or there, she offers no comprehensive case for it, and it quickly becomes apparent that the references she does make are merely a means to her one and only real end: utterly demonizing anyone more progressive than Tom Coburn.

The premise of her book isn’t the only thing sacrificed to this obsession, either. Charm, humor, and basic decency die for it on page 145 (see above). And Coulter repeatedly slices open the chest of logical consistency and gleefully rips out its still-beating heart.

In one glaring instance, she attacks the claims of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose skepticism about the Bush administration’s justifications for the Iraq war eventually led to the retaliatory outing of his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame. Wilson asserted that documents allegedly proving that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase uranium from Niger were forged and the information contained within them false — an assertion which Coulter dismisses by pointing out "the absurd logic that because documents are forged, what they purport to show has been proven false."

She’s right, that reasoning isn’t exactly airtight. And yet somehow, she completely forgets this when it comes time, a mere two pages later, to slam Bill Burkett as "CBS’s source for accusing President Bush of shirking his National Guard duties based on blatantly forged documents."

Coulter’s shameless use of contradictory arguments within pages — sometimes even paragraphs — of each other tars her as a polemicist far more interested in winner-take-all debate than honest political discussion. She’s even willing to try time travel to score points against her hated liberals. One of the most laughable segments in the book comes when Coulter attempts to illustrate that left-wingers are soft on criminals by pointing to the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Yes, that would be the Sacco and Vanzetti who were convicted and executed for murder in 1920s Boston.

Apparently, it was revealed in late 2005 that Upton Sinclair, the famed Progressive-era author who wrote a book arguing that the two men had been framed for their anarchist political views, had in fact been privately assured by their attorney that they were guilty as sin, but went ahead and published his text anyway.

Well, that sucks for Upton Sinclair’s credibility. But Coulter’s claim that Sinclair’s dishonesty is somehow an indictment of half the U.S. population nearly a century later is about as ridiculous as arguing that because the Republican Party originated with the anti-slavery movement, it has remained an unwavering political defender of civil rights for the past 150 years.

But oh, wait — Coulter says that, too. At which point you realize the other problem with Godless: its target audience is the haplessly or willfully ignorant.

I’ve encountered brilliant conservatives who can shake my fundamental beliefs to the core without once resorting to intellectual dishonesty. Coulter’s book is not for them. Godless is for the right-wingers who are so stupid or so desperate to validate their beliefs that they won’t bat an eye when she pretends that the realignment of segregationist Dixiecrats to the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 never happened; who won’t even flinch when she acts as if not a single conservative supported Clinton’s withdrawal from Somalia after the "Black Hawk Down" incident in 1993; who will eagerly swallow the diatribe against evolution into which the last hundred pages of the book devolve (pardon the pun).

It’s when you put these two fundamental flaws of Godless together, though, that the most deeply unsettling facet of not just this but all of Coulter’s work comes into clear relief. The all-consuming goal of these texts is not just to demonize progressives, but worse, to dehumanize them.

Lefties who are prone to spout slogans like "no blood for oil" may be grossly oversimplifying or outright mischaracterizing the motives of their political opponents, but at least those alleged motives are within the realm of human nature. We know that human beings can be perverted by fear, greed, selfishness or lust for power. Part of the reason progressives ascribe these motives to the likes of a Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld is because they have faced and fought with such feelings themselves.

Coulter, though, is playing an altogether different game. To believe her claims about why liberals do what they do, one must abandon any sense that they are fellow, flawed human beings and start thinking of them as some utterly different species — grotesque caricatures motivated by the kind of inexplicably evil intentions that drive cartoon villains.

Godless is rife with such dehumanizing assertions. Coulter insists that liberals have "an obsessive fetish with releasing violent criminals"; that "They just want …to release child murderers"; that "The most important value to liberals is destroying human life."

Liberals’ "governing principle …is to always kill human life (unless the human life being killed is likely to fly a plane into American skyscrapers, in which case, it is wrong to kill it)."

Liberals "enjoy giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats’ behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle."

And finally, of course, "If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too." (There’s that time-travel thing again. Funny, because I seem to recall that the “liberals” of that era led a reluctant, conservative America into war against the Nazis.)

By the end of Godless, I had serious doubts about whether Coulter herself believes most of what she writes. What worries me more, though, are those readers whom she can manipulate into embracing this invective; for whom her demonizations of the left will do little but relentlessly condition them to see their left-leaning friends and neighbors as otherworldly, incomprehensible, and irredeemably evil.

I can only hope that the folks who consume this diatribe hook, line, and sinker are few and far between. And I do have faith (yes, Ann, a liberal with faith) that America’s democratic discourse is robust enough to eventually relegate garbage like this to its rightful place.

I can’t help but wonder, though, whether in a different context this sort of casual hatemongering would become the bog water in which truly horrific evil spawns. Coulter’s ruthless deceptions and nasty caricatures bring to mind the words of another author whose pinky toenail she will never be worthy to touch. “By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him,” George Orwell wrote in August 1944. “But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them … you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.”

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