How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter

How to Talk to a Liberal

Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents' home, get a job, and start paying taxes. But if this doesn't work, you might have to actually argue with a liberal. This is not for the faint of heart. It is important to remember that when arguing with liberals, you are always within inches of the "Arab street." Liberals traffic in shouting and demagogy. In a public setting, they will work themselves into a dervish-like trance and start incanting inanities: "Bush lied, kids died!" "racist!" "fascist!" "fire Rumsfeld!" "Halliburton!" Fortunately, the street performers usually punch themselves out eventually and are taken back to their parents' house.

Also resembling the Arab street, liberals are chock-full of conspiracy theories. They invoke weird personal obsessions like a conversational deus ex machina to trump all facts. You think you're talking about the war in Iraq and suddenly you start getting a disquisition on Nixon, oil, the neoconservatives, Vietnam (Tom Hayden discusses gang violence in Los Angeles as it relates to Vietnam), or whether Bill O'Reilly's former show, Inside Edition, won the Peabody or the Peanuckle Award. This is because liberals, as opposed to sentient creatures, have a finite number of memorized talking points, which they periodically try to shoehorn into unrelated events, such as when Nancy Pelosi opposed the first Gulf war in 1991 on the grounds that it would cause environmental damage in Kuwait. Oddly enough, about half of liberal conspiracy theories involve the Jews. So be prepared for that.

A major impediment to arguing with liberals is: They refuse to argue. Liberals' idea of a battle of wits is to say "Bush lied!" in front of adoring college audiences and be wildly applauded for their courage. They're like hack road comics who coax a cheap round of applause out of audiences by declaring, "I just quit smoking!" or "My wife just had a baby!" Without a Roman Coliseum-style audience to give them standing ovations for every idiotic utterance, you get the liberal disappearing act.

At a loss whenever anyone argues back, liberals have a number of stratagems to prevent conservatives from talking. They shout conservatives down; unplug reporters' microphones; edit conservatives' answers in pretaped TV shows (Hardball) to make the conservative look like a monkey; burn student newspapers; and heckle conservative speakers. When John Stossel went to Brown University for a report on "date rape," he was mobbed by angry protesters chanting, "Rape is not TV hype!"--and then his microphone cord was unplugged by an angry student. College dropout Michael Moore put a microphone in Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy's face and asked for his help in getting more members of Congress to send their own family members to fight the war on terror. Kennedy replied that he would love to and that he already had two nephews in the military, one on his way to Afghanistan. Moore's documentary shows Kennedy's image--but cuts his answer from the film.

There is probably no conservative student newspaper in the country that has not been trashed or burned by liberals. Meanwhile, there is no known instance of College Republicans burning or trashing liberal student newspapers. To the contrary, conservatives get a kick out of watching liberals try to thrash their way to a coherent argument ("bush lied, kids died!"). In fact, if it weren't for conservatives with a taste for schadenfreude, literally no one would be listening to Air America--assuming it's still on the air by the time this book hits the stores.