Book Excerpt: 'How to Talk to a Liberal'

Oct. 5, 2004 — -- She's a staple of television news talk shows, a syndicated columnist and the author of three best-selling books. In her latest book, conservative pundit Ann Coulter offers her analysis of the American political scene.

Read the following excerpt from How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter.

Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents' home, get a job, and start paying taxes. But if this doesn't work, you might have to actually argue with a liberal. This is not for the faint of heart. It is important to remember that when arguing with liberals, you are always within inches of the "Arab street." Liberals traffic in shouting and demagogy. In a public setting, they will work themselves into a dervish-like trance and start incanting inanities: "Bush lied, kids died!" "racist!" "fascist!" "fire Rumsfeld!" "Halliburton!" Fortunately, the street performers usually punch themselves out eventually and are taken back to their parents' house.

Also resembling the Arab street, liberals are chock-full of conspiracy theories. They invoke weird personal obsessions like a conversational deus ex machina to trump all facts. You think you're talking about the war in Iraq and suddenly you start getting a disquisition on Nixon, oil, the neoconservatives, Vietnam (Tom Hayden discusses gang violence in Los Angeles as it relates to Vietnam), or whether Bill O'Reilly's former show, Inside Edition, won the Peabody or the Peanuckle Award. This is because liberals, as opposed to sentient creatures, have a finite number of memorized talking points, which they periodically try to shoehorn into unrelated events, such as when Nancy Pelosi opposed the first Gulf war in 1991 on the grounds that it would cause environmental damage in Kuwait. Oddly enough, about half of liberal conspiracy theories involve the Jews. So be prepared for that.

A major impediment to arguing with liberals is: They refuse to argue. Liberals' idea of a battle of wits is to say "Bush lied!" in front of adoring college audiences and be wildly applauded for their courage. They're like hack road comics who coax a cheap round of applause out of audiences by declaring, "I just quit smoking!" or "My wife just had a baby!" Without a Roman Coliseum-style audience to give them standing ovations for every idiotic utterance, you get the liberal disappearing act.

At a loss whenever anyone argues back, liberals have a number of stratagems to prevent conservatives from talking. They shout conservatives down; unplug reporters' microphones; edit conservatives' answers in pretaped TV shows (Hardball) to make the conservative look like a monkey; burn student newspapers; and heckle conservative speakers. When John Stossel went to Brown University for a report on "date rape," he was mobbed by angry protesters chanting, "Rape is not TV hype!" — and then his microphone cord was unplugged by an angry student. College dropout Michael Moore put a microphone in Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy's face and asked for his help in getting more members of Congress to send their own family members to fight the war on terror. Kennedy replied that he would love to and that he already had two nephews in the military, one on his way to Afghanistan. Moore's documentary shows Kennedy's image — but cuts his answer from the film.

There is probably no conservative student newspaper in the country that has not been trashed or burned by liberals. Meanwhile, there is no known instance of College Republicans burning or trashing liberal student newspapers. To the contrary, conservatives get a kick out of watching liberals try to thrash their way to a coherent argument ("bush lied, kids died!"). In fact, if it weren't for conservatives with a taste for schadenfreude, literally no one would be listening to Air America — assuming it's still on the air by the time this book hits the stores.

Life was much better for liberals when there were only three TV stations airing precious little news. Back in the pre-cable news days, public political debate consisted exclusively of liberal Democrats debating radical Democrats. Now that conservatives are physically present on cable news, liberals are terrified they might have to respond to a conservative point, so liberals filibuster and interrupt, hoping to never hear it. Turn on your TV right now and you'll see a liberal — probably Julian Epstein — trying to Filibuster his way out of having to respond to a conservative.

If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you said — unless you were, in fact, talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It's like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Inasmuch as liberals can only win arguments when no one is allowed to argue back, they enjoy creating fictional worlds in movies and on TV where liberals finally get to win. Remember the Andy Hardy movies? Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland would be headed for disaster — until Andy shouted out, "I tell you what! Let's put on a play!" With liberals, it's "We're losing on the facts! Let's make a movie!"

In movies, liberals are invariably morally and intellectually superior. They are also good-looking, witty, compassionate, and always right — basically Bob Byrd, Jerry Nadler, Al Franken, and Hillary Clinton rolled into one adorable bunch. Only in Hollywood is Robert Redford considered a dead ringer for Bob Woodward, Emma Thompson for Hillary Clinton, Dustin Hoffman for Carl Bernstein, and Andy Garcia for Al Franken. Typically, Republicans are played by hard-boiled B-list types whose only other roles are as cruel high school football coaches or rogue army drill instructors. Reflect on the fact that Anthony Hopkins played both Nixon and Hannibal Lecter.

The only policemen in the universe who are not aware that "cop-killer bullets" have never killed a cop are the ones on Law & Order. Only in liberal fantasy movies like Coming Home is a patriotic hawk the impotent klutz who shoots himself in the foot, and the liberal dove the sexually potent one. Only in Hollywood could a sitcom that parodies a U.S. president and is titled There's My Bush be about George Bush rather than Bill Clinton. (The show was unceremoniously and quietly canceled because of low ratings.) In movies, we always learn that there is no reason, ever, to Fight a war. Unless the Earth is invaded by aliens from outer space with huge scary spaceships and death rays and men of all races and nationalities can unite against a common enemy — like in Independence Day. So if the Earth is ever invaded by hostile aliens from outer space, you won't have to ask liberals twice to take up arms in defense of Planet Earth.

It was inevitable, given what liberals value, that on the popular sitcom Friends beautiful actresses would be depicted hyperventilating over George Stephanopoulos's Fictional manhood when he drops his Fictional towel. Only in the bizarro world of Hollywood can such a harmless little chap as George exude massive sexual potency. On HGTV, the female host of What Not to Wear leeringly jokes about seeing Bill Clinton in a Speedo. In real life, Monica Lewinsky can be heard on tape describing Clinton's executive branch thus: "Think of a thumb." No wonder liberals prefer the world of make-believe.