Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right by Ann Coulter Read Free Book Online

ABC’s 20/20.”
    It was a great gotcha moment, except that, as usual, once you go to the trouble to look up the facts, it was a lie. Rush was right. There was a cub fund and it had received more money than the orphaned children’s fund. Indeed, every detail was exactly as Rush had said. Though Rush was among the first to report on the disparity in the funds for the lions versus the humans, eventually the story became the subject of dozens of news articles.
    New York Times reporter Michelle Quinn wrote, for example, that “the cub had received $21,000, while the children’s trust fund had raised only 59,300” (just as Rush had said). She even quoted an environmentalist wacko defending the wildly disproportionate donations to the lion cub versus the orphaned children, saying, “People have support systems and animals don’t.” 86 The children’s fund did eventually gain some ground, but only thanks to Rush. As the Times’ Quinn also reported: “Since the disparity between the funds was publicized—Rush Limbaugh devoted part of his radio show on Tuesday to the subject—the children’s trust fund has received an additional $3,000 in checks and cash.”
    Even the famed 20/20 report did not contradict Rush’s account. The only issue disputed on the 20/20 segment was a point no one had made or could conceivably care about. To wit: 20/20 reported on how many “unsolicited public donations” the cub had received (a mere $3,000). This would have really nailed Rush (and the New York Times as well as scores of other news outlets) if any of them had ever claimed the $21,000 in donations to the cub had come exclusively from “unsolicited public donations.” The single largest donation had come from a nonprofit zoo group—or, as Rush had said, “a bunch of animal rights activists.”
    Locating some minor inaccuracy by Rush Limbaugh on the order of those corrected daily in the New York Times turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. It hardly seems worth the trouble to pursue FAIR’s less impressive finds. But on the off chance that anyone ever does locate some minor inaccuracy by Rush Limbaugh comparable to those regularly nurtured by the major media, the point is this: Rush Limbaugh is not the president, the vice president, or a Massachusetts senator. He’s not the New York Times. He’s not ABC, NBC, or CBS. Arguably, the satirical commentary of a noted polemicist should not be treated with the earnest indignation better reserved for the invasion of Poland.
    The best liberals can do to try to even the score on venom-spewing is to define every random nutcase in the country as “right-wing.” But no matter how many times liberals say it, Nazis and white supremacists (all six of them) are not “right-wing.” The Ku Klux Klan is not merely a somewhat more exuberant version of the Republican Party.
    A 1992 column in the Chicago Tribune casually reported that Illinois Republicans were “not worried” about David Duke causing trouble for President Bush. “The reason: Conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly, Don Totten and Denis Healy are already signed up for Bush.” 87 Phyllis Schlafly was torn but ultimately came out for Bush rather than David Duke. This is libel masquerading as analysis.
    If, for some peculiar reason, one were itching to draw a correlation between “white supremacist” nuts and one of the two mainstream political parties, Democrats are manifestly the more obvious candidate for that distinction. With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan’s premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society. They don’t even get to the first step with racists.
    Of course, one big difference between the Klan and liberals is that liberals have a lot