Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [7]
Okay. What percentage of Coulter’s readers do you suppose read this and thought, “My God! The New York Times called Clarence Thomas ‘a chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom’! I knew the Times was bad, but I never dreamed it was this bad!”? High nineties? And what percentage do you think bothered to go to the back of her book and wade through the endnotes to discover that the quotes came from a Playboy interview with former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders and from a black leader at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who was quoted in The New Yorker.
The key here, of course, is the sleight of hand—“. . . editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged . . .”—that deliberately leads gullible readers to the conclusion that the Times called Clarence Thomas “a colored lawn jockey.” This should tell us a couple things about Ann Coulter. First, she’s dishonest. No surprise there. But more importantly, it shows the contempt she holds for her own readers.
HOW TO LIE WITH FOOTNOTES #3:
• CITE A SOURCE, BUT TOTALLY MISREPRESENT WHAT IT SAYS
She really works this one into the ground. Early in the book she writes: “New York Times columnist Frank Rich demanded that Ashcroft stop monkeying around with Muslim terrorists and concentrate on anti-abortion extremists.” Except he didn’t. In the column, written during the anthrax scare, Rich simply criticized Ashcroft’s refusal to meet with Planned Parenthood, which has had years of experience with terrorism in the form of bombings and sniper attacks from pro-life extremists. The piece doesn’t include the words “monkeying” or “Islamic” or “Muslim,” or make any suggestion that Justice abandon its efforts against al Qaeda. Coulter pulls this wild distortion, like so very, very many, directly out of her ass.
Just another quick one. On page 118 (by the way, when you see Coulter on TV, interviewers never ask her about anything past page 12. You’ve got to give me credit for being able to stomach the entire screed), she writes that when the media consortium study on the 2000 Florida vote was released, it showed “that Bush had won on any count.” But the Washington Post story she cites says that the “Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of All Uncounted Ballots.” The reason there are so many capital letters in that quote is that it is from the headline of the story.
Don’t you go to hell for this stuff?
HOW TO LIE WITH FOOTNOTES #4:
• USE THE “ANY WORDS WRITTEN IN A NEWSPAPER CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO THAT NEWSPAPER” TECHNIQUE
(This can also be used to defame newscasts and magazines.) To show just how much the media elite hates Christians, Coulter writes:
For decades, The New York Times had allowed loose associations between Nazis and Christians to be made in its pages. Statements like these were not uncommon: “Did the Nazi crimes draw on Christian tradition?” . . . “the church is ‘co-responsible’ for the holocaust. . . .”
Okay. The first quote (“Did the Nazi crimes draw on Christian tradition?”) is from a 2001 book review. The Times reviewer, Paul Berman, was framing the question asked by the book he was reviewing, which was about a four-hundred-year-old play performed annually in Bavaria that portrays Jews as hateful and evil. Which, for the record, we are not.
The second quote is a quote of a quote from a 1998 Times article, “John Paul’s Jewish Dilemma.” The writer for the Times isn’t saying that the church is “co-responsible