Authors: Ann Coulter
Tags: #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Democracy, #Political Process, #Political Parties
• says women should be treated like men—but then demands a vast network of speech laws that assume women are hothouse flowers;
• yelps for clean, alternative energy—but violently opposes nuclear power;
• supports sustainable energy sources like offshore wind farms—unless the offshore wind farm obscures his view from Cape Cod;
• decries stereotyping—but when a black conservative comes along denounces that person as “unqualified,” “stupid,” a “house nigga,” “an Uncle Tom,” or “window dressing”;
• believes Tea Partiers are terrorists—but Islamic jihadists are victims;
• as mayor of New York City, closes off streets to traffic, clogs the remaining streets with bike lanes to be “green”—and then takes off in one of his two Gulfstream jets to London.
This welter of contradictions doesn’t even embarrass liberals. Why? Because they are a mob.
FOUR
CRACKPOT CONSPIRACY
THEORIES—
OR, AS LIBERALS CALL
THEM, “THEORIES”
M
obs are particularly susceptible to myths. Le Bon says, “The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversion that events undergo in the imagination of a throng.”
1
Ask any liberal if Sarah Palin boasted of her foreign policy experience by saying, “I can see Russia from my house.” In real life, Palin had responded to Charlie Gibson’s question about the proximity of Russia to Alaska by remarking that Russia could “actually be seen from Alaska.” The “I can see Russia from my house!” line was from a
Saturday Night Live
sketch. But facts are irrelevant to liberal beliefs.
Then in 2010, there were two famous videos, run on TV over and over again, that showed one thing, with liberals demanding that everyone admit the videos showed something else. It was like watching North Korean TV.
The first video was of several black congressmen walking through an anti-ObamaCare protest at the Capitol in March 2010 before the final health care vote. The media neurotically reported that the civil
rights hero John Lewis was spat at and called the N-word fifteen times on the video—although the videos of the congressmen walking through the protest showed no such thing. Finally, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of any black congressman being called the N-word once, much less fifteen times, at a protest crawling with video cameras and reporters hungry for an act of racism. (Also, the charge of using the N-word fifteen times was ridiculous on its face. Have you ever stood in front of someone calling them the N-word fifteen times? Believe me, it’s not easy. After a while they start finishing the word for you, and next thing you know they’re rolling their fingers and doing that “yada yada N-word yada” thing. It’s a nightmare.)
At that point, TV anchors began claiming they had seen it—but, strangely, could never manage to locate the video in order to show it to their viewers. After quoting a guest on
Larry King Live
(me) who had said, “If you can show somebody saying the N-word, well then you can win $100,000 if you can produce that tape, because there is no tape of it.” CNN’s Don Lemon said that was a lie and he had seen the tape with his very own eyes and would get it up on air so his viewers could see it for themselves:
Lemon:
OK. Listen, we have the tape here on CNN. I saw it on CNN’s
State of the Union.…
So the tape is there and we’ll try to get it on CNN so that you can see it and we’ll highlight it the same way that Candy Crowley did.
I guess Don’s producers couldn’t find the tape before the end of his program, or the end of the week, the month, or the year, since it’s never been shown on CNN or any other TV network.
Damn it! If only TV stations had some mechanism to show videos to their viewers …
To this day, the $100,000 reward remains unclaimed.
After weeks of liberals denouncing ObamaCare protesters for calling Representative Lewis the N-word—which never happened—no one, not one TV anchor, reporter, or commentator, ever apologized for this vicious lie. We just stopped hearing about black congressmen being called the N-word for a while.
But then time passed and most people forgot that when challenged, liberals had backed away from their claim that Tea Partiers had spat at black congressmen and called him a racial epithet. So liberals went right back to citing it as a fact again. After Jared Loughner shot up a Tucson Safeway, former congressman Alan Grayson went on MSNBC and reeled off a list of right-wing violence, including that a black congressman “was spit on.”
2
In October 2010, a crazed liberal woman in a wig charged Rand Paul as he arrived for a Senate debate. The disguised woman, Lauren Valle, was blocked by Paul’s supporters, who, not being members of SEIU, did not immediately beat her up. Consequently, Valle was able to break away and make another mad dash for the candidate. When Paul’s supporters stopped her a second time, she collapsed to the ground in the famous liberal
“You’re hurting me!”
routine. This time, one of Paul’s supporters—and my new bodyguard—Tim Proffit, jammed his foot on her shoulder, saying, “Now, stay down.”
Inasmuch as the last ten seconds of the woman’s performance was replayed one million times on television, it was perfectly obvious that Proffit had stepped on her shoulder, not, as TV anchors kept claiming, “stomped” on her “head.” Perhaps there was another video showing the head-stomping, but—as with the N-word video—TV anchors never managed to get that one on air. Maybe Proffit stomped on her head. Maybe he pulled out a gun and shot her. Maybe Lauren Valle stomped on Rand Paul’s head. Unfortunately, we don’t have any footage indicating that any of that happened.
But type in “rand paul” on Google, and the first two “suggestions” from Google are: “rand paul” and “rand paul head stomp.” Such media mistakes are never made in the other direction. No wild misstatement of fact ever gets circulated that makes liberals look worse or conservatives look better. There would never, for example, be a widespread lie that instead of stepping on her shoulder, the Paul supporter had accidentally tapped her shin with his foot.
In 2010, John McCormack of the
Weekly Standard
—an actual reporter with press credentials—was merely trying to ask Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley a question when he was assaulted and
knocked to the ground by an operative with the Democratic National Committee.
3
If Lauren Valle’s “head” was “stomped,” then McCormack was knifed. But we didn’t hear a peep about that assault.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann won the prize for best imitation of a North Korean talk-show host, calling Rush Limbaugh a “damned liar” for claiming Valle’s shoulder was merely stepped on—as the video ran showing her shoulder being merely stepped on:
Olbermann:
The bronze to Tokyo Rose Limbaugh, rationalizing the assault on Lauren Valle by lying about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
Rush Limbaugh:
… [N]ow in the video that AP itself posted, the man put his foot down on her shoulder in what looked to me like an effort to help restrain her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Olbermann:
You’re not only a damned liar, Limbaugh, you’re a damned bad liar.
4
That’s ideology trumping the process of your five senses. As Le Bon says, the “simplicity and exaggeration of the sentiments of crowds” result in the crowd’s knowing “neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence.”
5
MSNBC was also Hoax Central for the claim, during the 2008 campaign, that someone in the crowd had yelled “Kill him!” in reference to Obama at a Palin campaign rally. Olbermann spent most of October 2008 issuing blistering denunciations of John McCain and Sarah Palin based on this absurdity. “There’s a fine line between a smear campaign and an incitement to violence,” Olbermann lectured. “If Senator McCain and Governor Palin have not previously crossed it, this week, today even, they most certainly did.”
Guest-hysteric Richard Wolffe, then of
Newsweek
, said it was “no excuse” that Palin couldn’t hear what the crowd was shouting, because “what you’re seeing here is a very conscious attempt to paint Obama as un-American, as unpatriotic and, yes, consorting with what they call ‘domestic terrorists.’ ” (Liberals reject the label “domestic terrorists” for former Weathermen, preferring to call them “future Cabinet members.”)
After beating the “Kill him!” story to death, Olbermann delivered one of his prissy “Special Comments” about the nonincident, demanding that McCain stop campaigning. He railed, “Suspend your campaign now until you or somebody else gets some control over it. And it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.”
Anything else, Keith? Should I just concede the election now—or would next week be all right? While I’m up, can I get you a sandwich? How about a hot towel?
As has now been conclusively established, no one ever shouted “Kill him!” at a Palin campaign rally. The Secret Service takes even frivolous threats against a presidential candidate seriously. In 1997, for example, the Secret Service searched the apartment of a student journalist at Berkeley for writing a column about the upcoming football game against Stanford that included the line “Show your spirit on Chelsea’s bloodied carcass, because as the
Stanford Daily
lets us know, she is just another student.”
6
Needless to say, the Secret Service undertook a complete investigation of the claim that someone at a Palin rally had shouted “Kill him!” on hearing Obama’s name. They listened to tapes of the event, interviewed attendees, and interrogated the boatloads of law enforcement officers who had been spread throughout the crowd. The Secret Service’s conclusion was: It never happened. As even an article on the left-wing site Salon noted, “The Secret Service takes this sort of thing very, very seriously. If it says it doesn’t think anyone shouted ‘kill him,’ it’s a good bet that it didn’t happen.”
7
Because liberals passionately believe their own myths, this wasn’t the only time they embarrassed themselves in public. Here are a couple of examples in just one week’s time during the 2010 midterms:
After Sarah Palin told a Tea Party crowd to wait for the November election returns before partying “like it’s 1773,” liberals instantly concluded that Palin meant “1776” but was too stupid to know when the Declaration of Independence was signed. PBS’s Gwen Ifill tweeted “Sarah Palin: party like its 1773! ummm,” and the Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas tweeted “Sarah Palin to supporters: ‘Don’t party like it’s 1773 yet.’ … She’s so smart.” These ignorant posts were retweeted by dozens of other liberal geniuses, and the Huffington Post reprinted Moulitsas’s tweet.
It never dawned on the liberal mob that, when
speaking to a Tea Party group
, Palin might be referring to the year of the Boston Tea Party, which occurred in … yes, that would be 1773. Only if you start with the premise that Sarah Palin is an idiot and therefore if she said something, it must be idiotic, would you not even bother to look up the year of the Boston Tea Party before leaping to the conclusion that Palin meant to cite the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
For liberals, Palin’s speeches are like one of those puzzles in a children’s magazine that say, “Spot the mistakes.” Palin was talking, so she must have made a mistake. The problem was, there was no mistake.
The same thing happened when Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said that the Constitution does not mention a “separation of church and state.” Again, liberals believed their own fairy tales rather than the evidence. They’ve told themselves so many times that “the Constitution clearly provides for a separation of church and state!” no one ever bothered to check.
Whenever liberals talk about “constitutional rights,” they are invariably referring to some pronouncement inserted in an opinion by a rogue liberal judge fifteen years ago, which they now demand we treat as if it came from James Madison’s pen.
One thing we know is that terrorists who intend to destroy us must be given civilian trials because that’s what the founding fathers wanted
.
Really? Can I see the Constitution?
No, why would you ask?
Hey! That isn’t in the Constitution!
Yes, it’s right here, written in crayon, circa 2006
.
Apparently some conservatives took liberals up on the invitation to read the Constitution and saw that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not there.
What liberals meant by “It’s in the Constitution!” was “It was slipped into a Supreme Court opinion around 1950 by Justice Hugo Black, a racist, redneck anti-Papist from Alabama who wanted to make sure no public money would be spent busing students to Catholic schools.” But that doesn’t sound as impressive as “It’s in the Constitution!”
True, the “separation” phrase comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson. He also wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” but you don’t hear conservatives going around citing the “tree of liberty clause” in the Bill of Rights. Like “the separation of church and state,” it’s not in the Constitution.