Product Description

In her most controversial and fiercely argued book yet, Ann Coulter calls out liberals for always playing the victim – when in fact, as she sees it, they are the victimizers. In GUILTY, Coulter explodes this myth to reveal that when it comes to bullying, no one outdoes the Left. GUILTY is a mordantly witty and shockingly specific catalog of offenses which Coulter presents from A to Z. And as with each of her past books, all of which were NYT bestsellers, Coulter is fearless in her penchant for saying what needs saying about politics and culture today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3327 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-06
• Released on: 2009-01-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From School Library Journal
Citing political campaigns and the media and even taking a historical look at assassins, New York Times best-selling author Coulter (If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd All Be Republicans) strives here to convince readers of the evils of the liberal left. If, like Coulter, you believe that the biggest problem facing this nation is the plague of single mothers, then you're in for a treat (she devotes nearly an hour to this particular rant). Coulter fans will eat this up—others may find it hard to digest. Love the book or hate it, the narration by Margy Moore, whose inflection matches Coulter's no-holds-barred style, is right on target. For public libraries. [Audio clip available through library.booksontape.com; the Crown Forum hc, published in January, was a New York Times best seller.—Ed.]—Valerie Piechocki, Prince George's Cty. Memorial Lib., Largo, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
ANN COULTER is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans; Godless; How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must); Treason; Slander; and High Crimes and Misdemeanors. She is the legal correspondent for Human Events and a syndicated columnist for Universal Press Syndicate. A graduate of Cornell University and University of Michigan Law School, she clerked for the Honorable Pasco Bowman II of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and served as a litigator with the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm dedicated to the defense of individual rights. Her weekly column can be read at anncoulter.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1

LIBERAL MOTTO: SPEAK LOUDLY, AND CARRY A SMALL VICTIM

Liberals always have to be the victims, particularly when they are oppressing others. Modern victims aren’t victims because of what they have suffered; they are victims of convenience for the Left. There’s no way to determine if an action is offensive by looking at the action. One must know who did it to whom, and whose side the most powerful people in America will take. Republican senator Trent Lott committed a hate crime when he praised former segregationist Strom Thurmond at a birthday party, but a year later, Democratic senator Chris Dodd did nothing wrong when he praised a former Ku Klux Klanner, Senator Robert Byrd—who was also a sort of “community organizer.”

Playing the game of He Who Is Offended First Wins, the key to any political argument is to pretend to be insulted and register operatic anger. Liberals are the masters of finger-wagging indignation. They will wail about some perceived slight to a sacred feeling of theirs, frightening people who have never before witnessed the liberals’ capacity to invoke synthetic outrage. Distracted by the crocodile tears of the liberal, Americans don’t notice that these fake victims are attacking, advancing, and creating genuine victims.

Just as we’re always told that schoolyard bullies are actually deeply insecure, liberals rationalize their own ferocious behavior by claiming to have been wounded somehow. What about the little guy our poor, insecure bully is beating the living daylights out of? How’s his self-esteem coming along? That is the essence of liberals: They viciously attack everyone else, while wailing that they are the victims.

Liberals’ infernal habit of accusing others of what they themselves are doing distracts attention from who is really being attacked. No one is victimized by a mouse: Real victims are those who are called the oppressors by the powerful. Just as Nazi mythology made ordinary working Germans believe they were victims of Jewish oppressors—in order to oppress the Jews—today’s media-certified victims are the true oppressors, and the alleged aggressors are the real victims. To find the authentic victims in most situations, one can simply refer to the people the mainstream media urge us to hate, beasts such as George Bush, the Duke lacrosse players, Joe McCarthy, Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay, the Swift Boat Veterans, and Sarah Palin. But often the victims are nameless, faceless victims of repellent liberal policies that are promoted on behalf of counterfeit victims, such as single mothers or “the poor.” Media-anointed victims inevitably create actual victims who became so the old-fashioned way: They earned it.

Fake victims have become so crucial to liberal argument that you need a pathos-meter to follow politics in modern America. Every policy proposal is launched or opposed on the stories of victims. When Senator Hillary Clinton sought more federal money for New York City in 2007, she made a big show of attending Bush’s January 2007 State of the Union Address with the son of a New York City police officer, Cesar A. Borja, who had died that very day of a rare lung disease he had allegedly acquired from working “16-hour shifts” at the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks.

The New York Daily News had told the tear-jerking story of Cesar Borja a few weeks earlier in an article claiming that “when the twin towers fell,” Borja “rushed to ground zero and started working long days there.” Now he was dying of a rare lung disease, a result, the Daily News suggested, of his having “volunteered to work months of 16-hour shifts in the rubble, breathing in clouds of toxic dust.”1

Senator Hillary Clinton seized on the 9/11 victim’s story, parading Officer Borja’s twenty-one-year-old son at the State of the Union Address. She even sent President Bush a letter—made available to the press—inviting him to meet Officer Borja’s son, at the same time requesting more federal funding for New York’s emergency workers. The federal money allocated thus far, she said, was “only a down payment in repaying our debt to those who came to assist us in our hour of need.” She asked the president to “honor” Officer Borja’s memory and those who had “lost loved ones as a result of the 9/11 attacks.”2

Bush met with Officer Borja’s son and agreed to the additional federal funding for those suffering nonspecific health problems related to the 9/11 attack. Senator Clinton then released another letter noting “our responsibility to take care of those who took care of us”—those who, she said, “selflessly risked their lives and their health at Ground Zero.”3

Then it turned out the story of Officer Borja’s glorious heroism on 9/11 was a complete hoax. Borja had not “rushed” to the disaster site after the attack. He only started working there, directing traffic, near the end of December 2001, by which time much of the rubble had been cleared away. He was not a volunteer—this was his job. Indeed, the only reason he was working sixteen-hour days was to boost his pension just before he retired. In all, Borja had worked seventeen days at the World Trade Center, most of them in 2002.4 Borja retired in June 2003 and did not begin to develop pulmonary fibrosis until 2005. There were other possible explanations for his rare lung disease, such as his pack-a-day cigarette habit until five or six years before the 9/11 attack.5 Officer Borja had done nothing dishonorable, but he had not selflessly risked his life at Ground Zero, as Hillary Clinton claimed in order to beg for more taxpayer money for New York City.

Asked about its make-believe reporting on Borja’s undaunted heroism, the Daily News observed that “the paper had never explicitly said Officer Borja had rushed there soon after Sept. 11, only that at some point he had rushed there.”6 No matter—he had served his purpose and New York City got its federal funding.

All the Left’s seminal imagery keeps turning out to be a hoax.



daddy was diving repeatedly into ground zero—when he was nowhere near the place. The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist” told sickening tales about the brutish behavior of American troops in Iraq—and then he signed an affidavit admitting he made it all up. John Edwards was the loyal husband to his cancer-stricken wife—except it turned out he was carrying on an extended affair with Rielle Hunter.

The Democrats dredge up victim after victim, but it’s hard to find one real story. Why do liberals keep coming up with hoaxes for our edification? Time and again, liberals transform themselves into chaste Victorian virgins fainting over the suffering of their victim du jour—but then the facts come out, and liberals react like Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live: “Never mind.”

You know you’ve really made it in America when the Left weeps for you. But this much-sought-after victim status is evanescent, lasting only as long as the fake victim’s bellyaching advances the liberal agenda. Poor, long-suffering Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, Scott Ritter, Cindy Sheehan, the Jersey Girls, Scott McClellan—all putative victims of the Republicans—weep alone these days. The liberal establishment has moved on.

It’s so popular to be a victim in modern American society that people are constantly faking their own hard-luck stories—and not just in the “personal statement” essay in their Harvard applications. Among the recent hoax memoirs was one in 2008 by “Margaret B. Jones” called Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. Jones claimed to be a half-white, half–Native American girl who grew up in a foster home in South Central Los Angeles, raised by an African American mother. She said she ran drugs for the Bloods in the middle of the deadly crack wars of the 1980s, losing her foster brother to the gang wars. Jones gave interviews using an urban black patois, referring to her fellow gang members as her “homies.” In her book she passed on urban wisdom, such as “Trust no one. Even your own momma will sell you out for the right price or if she gets scared enough.”

But then it turned out Margaret Jones was really Peggy Seltzer, a suburban Valley Girl, who grew up with her biological family in affluent Sherman Oaks, California, where she attended a private day school. The closest she had come to the projects was watching Project Runway on Bravo. Her hoax was exposed when her sister, Cyndi Hoffman, called the publisher after seeing Seltzer’s photo by a book review in the New York Times—which praised the book as a “humane and deeply affecting memoir.”

Even when caught red-handed, Seltzer claimed to be serving a greater good: “I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to.” She said others had told her “you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk.” Admitting it was “an ego thing,” she explained, “I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”7

Also in 2008, a Holocaust memoir published in 1997 was exposed as a hoax. In the book, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, Misha Defonseca described her parents being arrested and deported by the Nazis when she was six years old. She wrote that she went to live with the De Wael family, who gave her the name “Monique,” but she so missed her parents that she embarked on a trans-European trek to find them. Wandering alone throughout Europe, she said she killed a German soldier, was sheltered by a pack of wolves, and saw a train full of Jews headed for t...

Customer Reviews

Many Good Items For Discussion -- But the Mix of Fact, Jabs & Humor Undoes the Message
Honestly I believe Ann Coulter brings a lot of good points to the table, but in such a manner as to destroy the possibility of actually influencing American politics and culture through her writings. The constant interjection of side points and comments requires the reader to have much more knowledge than most Americans possess, and certainly vastly more than commanded by the "useful idiots" she castigates. If this book is designed to wake up the electorate or effect change in the body politic, then it fails miserably. Rather it comes out as a never ceasing mix of truly eye-blinking facts followed by off-point snide remarks, regardless of their accuracy, and then some humorous comments that often are funny only to the extremely well-informed. In this format, the book is self-defeating.

Take for example the comments concerning Bill Ayers on page 90. Coulter makes several telling points concerning the Ayers' concentration on his terrorist days as being the highpoint of his life (and unfortunately giving him a pass on his current activities in training new followers dedicated to the destruction of the US), but then says as a correction that "Ayers is a professor of education, meaning that he is less qualified to teach than the entire population of the United States." I found this comment extremely funny, although it is an exaggeration (education professors are probably less qualified to teach than only about 90% of the population.) However, the mass of readers will not understand the truly abysmal standards in teaching education that exist in the US today and why that comment is both true and hilarious. When one teaches entire courses in how to make lesson plans or how to cut out paper dolls for teaching aids and then gives everyone an "A" grade if they attend all class sessions, then surely that person is at the bottom of the curve. But the comment detracts from the subject at hand and confuses the average reader.

It seems that everyone is focusing on the massive problem of single motherhood that is having catastrophic effects on the health and future of the US and that Coulter covers in Chapter Two. Apparently many liberal readers or persons who have single mothers as friends simply cannot get past the idea that the CHOICE to have a child while single, not marry the father, and not give the baby up for adoption is narcissistic and truly devastating to the child's eventual welfare. For a better understanding of this phenomenon see "Promises I Can Keep - Why Poor Mothers Put Motherhood Before Marriage" by Edin and Kefalas, and "Unequal Childhoods" by Annette Lareau. In spite of Coulter's comments that many interpret as "mean spirited", her criticism of the ennobling of single motherhood by fleckless liberals (who evidently wish to construct a vast underclass that they can control and act paternalistic towards) is on point. The reader should closely examine the case of the "octomom" to see a very extreme example of pathology in this problem.

The main theme of the book that the adoption of "victim" status to attack possible critics -- even when no one is victimizing the individual -- is well worth comprehending and a subject for futher research. My favorite chapter is the sixth that focuses on (in part) the absolutely dominating far-left (not just liberal) bias in the meadia which is the primary force for disinformation and propaganda in the US today. Fake stories attacking Republicans receive top billing, and true stories about Democrat malfeasance are ignored by the main-stream media. The evidence is overwhelming that this is the case as Coulter points out, but again her constant comments and obscure side points damage the presentation. I can understand why the "Guilty" parties rage against this book -- not only for exposing the truth to a very large measure, but also because the author's writing style makes them look both evil and silly. Let's choose just one -- evil or silly. And the author makes a seminal contribution when she objects to using the word "courageous" to describe every little statement made by a liberal that might be unpopular to people paying taxes and working for a living.

In short I recommend this book but wish the author had confined herself to a scholarly style without the snide (but accurate) remarks and humor than tend to undermine the message with those not already in the choir. One is tempted to assume that the author uses this style to aggravate and annoy, rather than to inform and act as a catalyst to effect change. One is even tempted to assume that the continued malfeasance by liberals and the far-left is important so that more books like this one can be produced. I doubt that the reader benefits nearly as much as the author due to her chosen style.

A joy to read
Ann Coulter is a joy to read, for those of us who are in the right. She is smart, witty, and enjoyably nasty. She does her homework without being a boring grind. Her books have plenty of substance; she doesn't rant much; she has a lawyer's reasoning ability and the timing of a good stand-up comedian. She doesn't talk down to her readers, and makes politics, and political invective, entertaining.

The extreme reactions to her - major newspapers failing to carry her, or the harpies of The View shouting her down - just show she's right how intolerant the faction of alleged tolerance, actually is. Coulter is no more nasty on the right than Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd are on the left; that op-ed pages typically regard her as too controversial while Rich or Dowd are somehow mainstream, is a crime against thought.

In "Guilty" she takes apart the liberal reliance upon victimhood to advance its cause, and suggests, to the contrary, that liberals are the victimizers, a refreshing thought.

The underlying theme of all her books is media bias: how the mainstream media takes the liberal line hook, line and sinker, how it fails to cover the left with the same scrutiny and savagery with which it covers the right, and how it repeatedly fails to notice that the liberal king (well, co-facilitator) is wearing no clothes. Except maybe when they're admiring Michelle Obama's arms or Barack's beach photos.

The chapter on single motherhood and the plague it represents is excellent. Single motherhood is the fount from which a disproportionate number of social ills spring; as Coulter frequently points out, various economic and educational achievement disparities between blacks and whites disappear when single motherhood is taken into account.

She's such a joyous warrior. I admire her total chutzpah in arguing that U.S. history's major assassins - as liberals whine about the constant supposed threat to Obama's life - were almost all, in the broad scheme of things, creatures of the left. Is it a stretch to paint John Wilkes Booth - an actor, opposed to the violence Lincoln visited upon the South - as a liberal? You be the judge. But ask why history tends to launder out Charles Guiteau's having grown up in the Oneida Community, a free-love commune in Western New York (the women didn't much like him, Coulter writes; his nickname was "Charles Gitout". I grew up in Western New York, even won a contest on local history as a student, but was never taught about this.) The first major act of Palestinian terror in the U.S. was RFK's assassination; that, too, goes down the memory hole. JFK conspiracy theories usually gloss over Oswald's marriage to the daughter of a KGB colonel. She was allowed to marry him and they were allowed to emigrate, but the KGB had no plans for him? Occam's razor could use a good stropping here.

I use the word "chutzpah" above because I'm Jewish. Unlike my liberal brethren, I take no offense at Coulter's remarks about Jews and others who accept Christianity as being "perfected". I understand what Coulter is getting at: you're allowed to believe your own religion, and you are not compelled to find all others the equal of yours. If you did, why would you devote yourself to yours in the first place? The best diversity stance for a truly religious person to take is, other religions may have something to offer, but mine is a little better, which is why I'm proud of it and think it's worth living by. I think that about my religion; and I don't begrudge Coulter the right to think it about hers.

Jews who allege this to be anti-Semitic violate the commandment against false accusation. Making weak or unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism dishonors the memory of every Jew who ever actually suffered from it, and feeds resentment of Jews in the present day. I'd rather have one Ann Coulter on Israel's side, than a thousand liberal Jews whose "support" of Israel is so totally diluted as to render it no support at all - by their misgivings about its right to self-defense and to statehood; by their bottomless concern for those poor Palestinian victims, and by their appeasement of genuine anti-Semitism on the left.

But without false charges of anti-Semitism, and sexism, and racism, and bigotry - could liberals ever fool enough voters?

Thanks
Never could understand why single motherhood was held so virtuous while the associated child suffered exposure to all sorts of negative outcomes. If you ever pondered over the same observation, you should read this book. It alone makes the book worth while.