Greetings, Freepers! I was pleased to see I had come to your attention, back on October 22 or thereabouts. I read through all the posts (at the time, about 60) and, IMHO, nobody laid a glove on me. I'm ready for the second round. I haven't changed a thing.
-- Dr. Limerick
27 October 2002
Ann Coulter is merely the latest in a dubious tradition of self-promoters who have discovered that if you say enough outrageous things, you can get yourself an opportunity to say them on television. She is a sideshow attraction, not the main event. Her only significance in the war between Left and Right is diverting attention to herself, and away from the machinations of the real players in the game.
She excels in this role. She has a bizarre sex appeal and willingness to shoot her mouth off that make her a natural on television. If she were witty instead of just mean-spirited and nasty, maybe she could be the Right's answer to Sandra Bernhardt. But in the book Slander, she adds a dangerous new twist. In her book she has included, and heavily publicized, 780 or so footnotes, in the hope that their very heft will buy Slander a credibility not shared by the books of, say, Bernard Goldberg, Sean Hannity, or (on the Left) Mike Moore. This symbol of accuracy and scholarship is meant to reduce skepticism, tricking people into thinking that her rants are factually-based rants.
The research presented on this web site is meant to rebut that idea. In fact, her footnotes do a poor job of supporting the assertions she makes. Many assertions go unfootnoted; many others are not supported by the footnote cited. Still others show signs of selective quotation, where once the entire article or quotation is examined, it implacably points in some direction other than what Ms. Coulter would like us to think.
My conclusion is that the book has 780 footnotes for the main purpose of having 780 footnotes. They're pure ballast. How else to explain, e.g., this: She asserts that Hollywood celebrities and trial lawyers make large donations to the Democratic Party. No one really doubts this. But she adds a footnote anyway. The footnoted article is about contributions by Disney executives to the Senate campaign of Hillary Clinton. The article says nothing about the Democratic Party, Hollywood celebrities or trial lawyers. True, Clinton is a Democrat, Disney is in the entertainment business, and the article mentions that lawyers (never singling out "trial lawyers") have been generous to Clinton. But the article simply does not support the global assertions about the Democratic Party, etc. It is absolutely incredible that Ms. Coulter could not have found a supporting citation if she had looked. Instead, she just cited the first article she found on Lexis/Nexis that was even in the right ballpark. Or so it seems to me.
This means that the footnotes are worse than useless, they are misleading. Don't be misled.
With a few exceptions, which I explain carefully, I have checked or attempted to check all of the footnoted citations in Chapter 2 of Slander. Originally, I thought I would try to plow through the whole book, but I changed my mind. I started with Chapter 2 because many reviewers and bloggers had picked at Chapter 1. On the TV show Booknotes, Ms. Coulter said that Chapter 2 is her favorite. This is coincidence, but for me a happy one. If I can convince you that her favorite chapter is largely unsupported by her footnotes, then perhaps you will be skeptical of her other chapters as well. As I am.
This is intended to supplement, not to denigrate, the early efforts of Bob Somerby, Scoobie Davis, Richard Roeper, Spinsanity, or The American Prospect. Indeed, I have linked to all of their work I know about, to make this a "one-stop shop" for Slander rebuttals. The problem is that the piecemeal nature of their work leaves open the possibility that they have cherry-picked the major errors, and that the rest of the book is sound. I have clearly not cherry-picked footnotes, because I take them one at time, in order.
Unless, of course, you think I've fact-checked the entire book and chosen the worst chapter for this site. Actually, I haven't even read most of the book. Part of Chapter 1 and all of Chapter 2. I browsed here and there when wrestling with the dilemma of whether to buy the book. Why bother to read more? If you're served a bad meal, you don't have to eat the whole thing to verify it's bad. Slander is similar.
I don't intend to do any more research on Slander. I will, however, update links to Slander sites or commentary as they come to my attention. Also, I am not in the business of debunking or expressing outrage at other Coulterisms, for example when she blurted out that she'd like to have seen the New York Times building bombed instead of the Murrah Building. I was pleased to see the editorial where the State College, Pennsylvania, newspaper says it is dropping her column because all she has to offer is uninformed hate, but I won't be collecting any riffs on such themes.
Who would want to spend any more time than necessary with someone like her?*
Truthfully yours,
/s/
Dr. Rush Limerick
1 September 2002
*P.S. Somebody wrote to say that this closing question, "Who would want to spend any more time than necessary with someone like her?," is an example of the uninformed liberal name-calling that Ms. Coulter is talking about. I happen to disagree; I simply would not want to be in the same room with the woman.
But more to the point, here's Ms. Coulter herself, in the last paragraph of her column of August 28, 2002, which I believe was the last straw for the State College editor:
"This is as we have come to expect from [the Kennedy family] of heroin addicts, statutory rapists, convicted and unconvicted female-killers, cheaters, bootleggers and dissolute drunks known as 'Camelot.' Why would anyone want such people as their 'good friends'?"
Not much different from mine, IMHO.
9 September 2002
LINKS
Slander Reviews, Commentary, etc.:
Scoobie's interview of July 13, 2002, with AHC herself
TAPPED, The American Prospect's quasi-blog (link is to 7/1/2002, but
AHC refs continue through July)
Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times, 7/22, 23/2002
(link no longer works; I think you have to pay)
(scroll down)
Eric Alterman, The Nation, 9/23/2002 (cites this page! in print!)
(cites this page, in print, on my birthday, yet!)
Other Ann Coulter Sites:
Worthwhile Sites:
THE TWO AND ONLY:
Paul Krugman (his occasional blog, supplementing his NYT columns)
HONORABLE MENTION:
some coins, maybe he can get more bandwidth)
Blah3.com (examples of the kind of campaign commercials the Democrats
would be making if the Democrats had cojones)
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