Slander
Ann Coulter is fortunate that she is thin, blonde, pretty, professional, and glib. Those qualities make her immune to attacks that Liberals sometimes foist on inconvenient women. Despite the fact that Liberals claim to be thoughtful and compassionate feminists concerned that women be treated seriously, their attacks on troublesome women would make Archie Bunker blush. Paula Jones, President Clinton's accuser, was portrayed as a "sleazy" woman from the "trailer parks." [1] While Left-wing columnist Julianne Malveaux speculated that, Linda Tripp, the woman who taped incriminating conversations with Clinton's girl friend Monica Lewinsky, had been beaten with an "ugly stick." Coulter is too attractive, too academically pedigreed, and too smart for charges of being low class or ugly to be plausible. No, she gets to be labeled a "shrew." [2]
Ann Coulter is a skilled polemicist of the first rank. In her recent book, Slander, she documents Liberal "slander" against Conservatives. She is certainly not above calling names being herself adept at creative descriptions. Her primary problem is not with invective, but slander, the deliberate use of false characterizations. This is especially disconcerting when the slander comes not from Left-wing polemicists but from purportedly objective news sources.
Coulter's style is brash and over-the-top. Although Slander provides plenty of red meat for true believers, her shrillness will turnoff the neutral, and inflame her enemies. Nonetheless, the book is an almost infinite source of delicious nuggets of information for Conservatives. If she had been more academic in her prose she would have been even more persuasive, but she certainly would not have garnered as much attention. Some of her themes deserve special attention.
There are Conservatives on the radio waves and conspicuous commentators, but, as Coulter explains, the news divisions of the major networks are dominated by former Liberal politicos. Tim Russert, of Meet the Press, worked for Governor Mario Cuomo and Senator Patrick Moyihan. Jeff Greenfield wrote speeches for Robert Kennedy, the same role Chris Matthews filled for President Jimmy Carter and former Speaker of the House Tip 0'Neill. Brian Williams worked in the Carter Administration. Rick Inderfurth went from the Carter Administration to ABC News and back through the revolving door to the Clinton Administration without skipping a beat. A senior vice president of NBC News was a Clinton special assistant. And, of course, Clinton's famous advisor, George Stephanopoulos, now helps to host ABC's This Week. Other members of the Clinton Administration have found their way to US News and World Report, Nightline, and Time magazine. However, when Susan Molinari, the attractive Republican Congresswoman from New York, became a Saturday morning news anchor for CBS (a job that lasted about a year), the New York Times gravely intoned about the "potentially awkward transition from being one the nation's best known advocates of Republican ideology to being a CBS News anchor."
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