The always funny T.Bogg reviews Ann Coulter's Slander :
Ms. Coulter has achieved quite a feat with her latest book; she has made it review-proof. Let's forget for the moment that facts are Kryptonite to Ms. Coulter. By framing “Slander” as a critique of the putative "liberal media" she can sit back and dismiss any and all critiques of her book as...voila!...proof that the media is indeed liberal, without the muss and fuss of having to back-up any wild assertions that she has made. True, she offers up 35 pages of footnotes, yet she forgets that however copious the footnotes, quantity does not equate to accuracy or relevancy. To put it another way, swinging a golf club a thousand times a day doesn't make you Tiger Woods.
Ms. Coulter has taken to defending some of her more outré assertions as…a joke!…hyperbole!…irony!…sarcasm!…in much the same manner in which a person who has made a horribly out-of-place comment, immediately insists, “I was only kidding!”. This being one of the finer defenses used by fourteen year old girls and people who “don’t get out much”, if you know what I mean. To her credit there is much in her slim book that cannot be dismissed, simply because it’s her opinion, and who is to say that she isn’t so deluded that her opinions shouldn’t make perfect sense according to her own mis-firing synapses? Other assertions cannot be dismissed lightly, or easily for that matter, since they lack any internal logic, point, or relationship to a conscious human thought process. For example, if someone said “Blue dog, banana banana go fish” you couldn’t dispute either their assertion nor could you malign their intentions. (Disclaimer: Not that Ms. Coulter’s writing is of this quality).
In the interest of fairness, and in her defense, I think it is only proper to submit Ms. Coulter’s own words from a recent television interview as the last word on the importance of this lively, yet horribly disfigured and flawed piece of work:
COULTER: “No, I'm saying - I'm merely - I'm saying what I'm saying. I don't know why I'm always having people say, are you trying to say - you know what you can do if you want to know what I'm saying is listen to what I'm saying. What I'm saying is what I said ...”—Crossfire 6/26
Who can argue with such conviction and clarity? I know I can’t.
