…About The Inner Liberal and How to Make Liberals Angry
In previous entries "How to Talk to Ann Coulter" I took on the challenge of answering Ann Coulter's attack on liberals in her book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (by Crown Forum).
According to her publisher, Ann tells us, with incisive reasoning, why liberals are "so wrong."
In "How to Talk to Ann Coulter #2," I discussed the first three bullet points made by her publisher on the Barnes and Noble website. According to her publisher, the book offers Coulter's unvarnished take on:
- The essence of being a liberal: "The absolute conviction that there is one set of rules for you, and another, completely different set of rules for everyone else."
- John Kerry: "A reporter asked Kerry, 'Are you for or against gay marriage?' As usual, his answer was, 'Yes.' "
- Her 9/11 comments: "I am often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever!"
- The state of the Democratic Party: "Teddy Kennedy crawls out of Boston Harbor with a quart of Scotch in one pocket and a pair of pantyhose in the other, and Democrats hail him as their party's spiritual leader."
- Her philosophy for arguing with liberals: "Tough love, except I don't love them. My 'tough love' approach is much like the Democrats' 'middle-class tax cuts'--everything but the last word."
- The "Treason Lobby": "Want to make liberals angry? Defend the United States."
Well, actually, I didn't discuss points 1, 2 and 3 so much as demolished them; and, I plan to demolish points 4, 5 and 6, as well, right here and now.
Except I think I can skip 4 because the legal system has already dealt with it. It's kind of like charging George Bush with dereliction of duty in the Texas Air National Guard now because long ago he may or may not have avoided his sworn duty to defend the United States by flying fast planes. Apparently, the authorities let him off way back then and maybe we should trust their judgment. (If you are having trouble with the referent of the pronoun him in the previous sentence, then you are making my point for me.)
Points 5 and 6 are so much more interesting, anyway.
Let's take a look at point 5. Ann, you could profit from finding it in your heart to love us liberals. I know its tough (that's why they call it "tough love," you know) but try it. Call up your friend Bill Maher, for example, and say something like, "I love you, Bill," just to see how it feels. Now doesn't that feel better already?
Makes your heart go pitter patter, doesn't it? You know what that is? That's your "Inner Liberal!" That's right, Ann, we all have an Inner Liberal. (Liberals have an Inner Conservative, too, but we don't like to talk about it any more than conservatives like to talk about their Inner Liberal.) It's right there next to your heart, pounding on it (that's the pitter patter part) and trying to get some attention. It's kind of delicately whispering in your heart's ear:
HEY! (POUND! POUND!) THERE'S MORE LOVE OUT HERE! WHERE DO YOU WANT ME TO PUT IT?! (BANG! BANG! BANG!)
Despite all the talk about "conservatives" and "liberals," real people (the ones who vote, anyway) all have both liberal and conservative principles.
Let's take one example. Here's a liberal principle. See if you can't find a part of you that believes in this principle, even though you are a "conservative." It will help you identify your Inner Liberal:
Freedom of thought and speech
Did that tickle? Here's another one:
Equality under the law
Oooh! Palpitations. Here's a few more:
- Presumption of innocence.
- Freedom of association.
- Tolerance of diversity.
- Equality of opportunity.
- Freedom from unfair economic influence.
- Respect for the individual.
- The right to travel and assemble.
- Freedom from military rule.
- The right to representation in government.
- Privacy.
- Fairness.
- Mercy.
I bet that list really warmed your heart and now you've got a feeling for what I mean by you Inner Liberal. So, now that you've found your Inner Liberal, it should be a lot easier to love "liberals." After all, they're just the same as you, except they are "in touch with" their Inner Liberal.
Now we come to point number 6, which is one of those sound bites that we've heard so much about. It's time to take the sting out of this sound bite.
The implication, obviously, is that a liberal would never defend the United States, and, worse yet, would be offended by anyone who did. Why, if you defended the U.S., those insane liberals would get angry!
This shows us a primary misconception that conservatives often have about liberals: that liberals are emotional. This is patently false. All you have to do is look at the last three presidential debates. Did you see John Kerry display even a modicum of emotion? No, he was the epitome of logic, propounding the facts and pounding out the logic without any concern whatsoever for its emotional impact. And there was George Bush, never a commander of facts and certainly not anyone to follow a logical argument to its conclusion or see down the road beyond the first turn, but making an impassioned appeal to his political base that seemed to stimulate every last one of them into a blind frenzy.
Conclusion? Conservatives are emotional and liberals are not. Liberals are thinkers. Take my word for it.
And we all know that Kerry is a "tax-and-spend liberal" as surely as we know that Bush is a "spendthrift [Note 1] conservative," who has instituted the biggest "child tax"[Note 2] in history! I suppose that makes Bush a "tax-and-spend conservative," but somehow the title just doesn't have the same appeal.
It's such common knowledge among conservatives that Kerry is a liberal that I thought I would inform fellow liberals of this fact, too. It might endear him to them. I'm not sure I myself would call Kerry a liberal for a couple of reasons. First of all, he refuses to call himself one and I think people should have a right to their own labels. Second, someone who believes in "faith-based initiatives" and similar policies may fail the litmus test of liberalism, anyway.
But let's stipulate that Kerry is a liberal, because, what I said in the previous paragraph notwithstanding, everyone other than John Kerry already knows he's a "liberal," so he makes a good example.
John Kerry famously went to Vietnam and defended the United States.
But wait! He got angry! So, maybe Ann has a point. Maybe what she meant to say was: "Want to make liberals angry? Have one defend the United States."
No, it doesn't work. What actually made Kerry angry was the way some other people defended the United States by committing atrocities. That would make me angry, too, and I'm a liberal.
Ann's logic simply fails. Kerry defended this country and it doesn't make me angry that he did. I'm a liberal. It is therefore false that defending the United States makes liberals angry because there is at least one counterexample.
What does make liberals angry? I think it's pretty clear what makes us angry, specifically with regard to defending the United States: going about it stupidly and/or ineffectively. Here's just a couple of ways someone defending the U.S. could make us plenty angry:
- Fight a war in Iraq and not secure the ammunition before it got into the hands of people who hate us.
- Fight a war in Iraq and not adequately defend the borders so that terrorists could leak in from, say, Syria and Iran.
- Fight a war in Iraq and let people get away with capturing workers and beheading them.
- Fight a war in Iraq and station our National Guard there as if they were a ready reserve.
- Fight a war in Iraq with so few troops in the regular military that we have to coerce them into staying after their gig is up.
- Fight a war in Iraq.
If any of these things makes you angry, then you should consider yourself a "liberal." At least, you must have an Inner Liberal. Perhaps you should pay attention to it.
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[Note 1] I have been told that most people don't know what a "spendthrift" is because it is an old word, not much current in the modern world. I would use a more modern word that means the same thing, but I couldn't find one in the MS Word Synonyms lookup. So, let's try to give it some currency, the same way Al Franken has been working on "cheating on the square." For our purposes, a "spendthrift" is a guy who is unable to save even a penny because he will spend it as soon as it hits his hand. It perfectly describes someone who inherits a multi-trillion-dollar surplus and spends through it so fast that we have a multi-trillion-dollar deficit in only a couple of years.
[Note 2] A "child tax" is a tax paid by children when they group up. It's the latest, greatest term for an old word that we don't need any more: deficit.