Darn that Ann Coulter. There she was, a guest panelist on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” show last week, talking about Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and liberals. Maher briefly mentioned Coulter’s latest book — another best-seller, by the way — titled “Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.”
“You’re in there, did you know that?” Coulter asked Maher as he held the book aloft for a camera shot.
“Oh yeah, I know that,” Maher answered.
I was hoping Coulter would then tell the audience — many of them fawning, adoring Maher-istas who cheer wildly no matter what Maher says — some of the things she said about her frequent debating partner.
Part of Maher’s shtick is race-baiting; he insists that the Republican Party is the party of racism.
“I’m not saying all Republicans are racist,” Maher once quipped, “but these days, if you are a racist, you’re probably a Republican.”
That wasn’t the Maher quote that made Coulter’s book; it was this one, about the 2010 Republican election victories: “I haven’t seen Republicans so happy about taking seats since they made Rosa Parks stand up.”
I did not see Maher make the comment, but I’m betting that the yahoos in his audience wildly cheered and applauded. There’s only one problem, which Coulter mentions in her book: Democrats ran the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama in 1955, the year Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. It was Republicans, Mr. Maher, not Democrats, who for years were the champions and promoters of civil rights for black Americans.
Coulter gives some of that history in “Demonic,” citing the civil rights efforts of President Eisenhower and the underrated and unappreciated — by America’s current crop of liberal, Democratic, black misleaders — civil rights record of President Nixon.
I’ll be blunt: Nixon had a much better civil rights record than President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who gets much of the ballyhoo. And Nixon’s civil rights record sure as heck was much better than President Kennedy’s.
Part of Coulter’s book is devoted to the current obsession of liberals and Democrats with restoring civility to political debate and discourse. Again, Coulter makes clear, liberals and Democrats are in no position to lecture anyone, especially Republicans and conservatives, about the need for civility in debate and discourse.
Jared Loughner, the suspect in the Tucson, Ariz., that killed six and left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seriously wounded, wasn’t some right-wing nut inspired by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck, Coulter writes.
“According to voluminous Twitter postings the day of the day of the shooting by Caitie Parker, one of Loughner’s friends since high school,” Coulter says in Demonic, “[Loughner] was ‘left wing,’ ‘a political radical,’ ‘quite liberal,’ and ‘a pot head.’ If any public figure influenced this guy, my money’s on Bill Maher.”
I’ll gladly take some of that action. Maher spent the last part of the show — the portion where no one gets to speak but him — chiding those middle-class and working-class stiffs about voting for Republicans, the party of the rich, in Maher’s world. He compared middle-class and working-class people who vote Republican to the jury in the Casey Anthony murder trial, hinting both were clueless.
Maher seems to think the money of rich Americans isn’t theirs, but his. That’s why we working-class and middle-class stiffs vote Republican. Because once a government justifies taking the money of the rich, you can rest assured it’s coming after ours next.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
