Ann Coulter’s Mugged: A (Mostly) Frank Monologue About Race

Speaking as a foreigner, can I just say on behalf of the rest of the world that America should either have that “frank discussion about race” pronto – or shut the hell up about it.

Yeah, yeah, slavery, blah. We know.

But it is SO weird watching you guys from a distance, obsessing over a horrible thing that happened 150 years ago.

When the topic turns to race, the same nation that invented Hollywood, jazz, and manned space flight transforms, Hyde-style, into a shriveled hypochondriac with Tourette syndrome, nervously taking its “tolerance” temperature (rectally) every half hour and announcing the embarrassing results to all within earshot, between yelling “Selma! Juneteenth!! Tuskgeegee!!!” over and over again.

We kinda wanna slap you.

Ann Coulter’s new book challenging America’s propensity for historical scab-picking and twisted, counterproductive race-based social policy is called Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama.

It isn’t the first book of its kind, of course.

We’ve had Larry Elder’s Stupid Black Men and any number of worthy tomes by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Joseph C. Phillips, and John McWhorter, all bravely pointing their lances at the nation’s highly lucrative (and deadly) Liberal-Racial Complex.

However, unlike all those writers, Coulter is a white woman — which is evidently all it takes to make Whoopi Goldberg swear at Coulter on television.

(I can’t imagine Goldberg reacting the same way to a black male author, conservative or otherwise. Your mileage may vary.)

I couldn’t help but think back to Goldberg’s long-ago, star-making turn on Broadway, portraying (among other characters) a little black girl who wishes she was white, showing off her “long luxurious blonde hair” – in fact, a white shirt she’s bobbypinned to her head.

I don’t know who installed Goldberg’s buttons, but Coulter’s very existence sure does push ’em.

She has that effect on people. I’ve seen it up close.

I hope to tackle Coulter Derangement Syndrome in a separate article, however.

Back to the new book:

Coulter’s thesis is that after the ridiculous O.J. Simpson “not guilty” verdict — and particularly, the racially divided reaction to it — sane Americans finally gave themselves permission to say farewell to white guilt and all its attendant evasions, hypocrisy, awkward social etiquette, and toxic lawmaking.

However, Coulter argues, racial demagoguery made a comeback the moment Obama launched his presidential campaign, and continues to poison the nation to this day.

You’ll be shocked by what you learn in Mugged.

That holds true even if, like me, you’re a modern American history buff, and figure you’re already hip to the truth about Jonestown, O.J., Duke Lacrosse, and Rodney King.

Incredibly, Coulter digs up even more dirt on those events and the hucksters who got rich off them or escaped well-deserved punishment while innocents suffered.

Mugged, like all of Coulter’s best books, is exhilarating yet depressing. If LexisNexis had any guts, they’d hire Ann Coulter as a spokesperson. Surely she gets more mileage out of her annual subscription than any of their clients, given the astonishingly damning stuff she’s able to dig up from the archives of the New York Times and other papers, not to mention old TV news transcripts.

Little commented upon when folks complain of Coulter’s style is that quite often she merely lets the world’s idiots, busybodies, and well-meaning villains speak for themselves in the form of smug editorials and blatantly biased, factually inaccurate reportage from the pages of the Grey Lady and elsewhere.

No doubt these news outlets were hoping nobody would ever read these damning scribbles again. In each of Coulter’s books, these archival gleanings feature prominently, and Mugged is no exception.

On page 5, thrill again to Democratic strategist Bob “I Once Paid A Hooker With A Personal Check — In Sobriety!” Beckel boasting of the “scars on the back of his neck” from “time spent in the vineyards of the civil rights movement” — even though he was barely a teenager in the early 1960s.

Running out of reasons to loathe Maxine Waters? Hey, did you know that after the guy who dropped a concrete block on Reginald Denny’s head got out of prison, Waters got him a job? (Page 125.)

I was really impressed by the following on page 109 — it is vintage Ann Coulter:

If we attended a party at the [home of Chris Matthews] in Chevy Chase, Maryland, how many blacks would we see? Could we at least wave to the black neighbors? The New York Times write-up of his son’s wedding included a panoramic shot of the church, showing nearly a hundred guests. Not one of them is black. (…) A Republican saddled with the facts of Matthew’s life would be convicted of racism in five minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwu1pN754I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxRF9XP9CX4

I’m only human, despite rumors to the contrary, so it’s hard for me to find fault with anyone who cites me in their books.

As she did in her precious work, Demonic, Coulter generously notes my findings about the 2009 “Holocaust Museum” shooter, who was widely described as “angered in large part because of Obama’s election.” In actual fact, Coulter writes:

The Holocaust Museum shooter was James von Brunn, who hated Bush, hated McCain and hated “neoconservatives.” He was a 9/11 “truther” and detested Christianity as much as what he called “the Holocaust religion.” He is what is known in professional law enforcement circles as a “nut.”

However, I do have some quibbles about Mugged, and also want to try to get to the bottom of Coulter Derangement Syndrome, which goes to a larger problem of why some conservative writers inspire such passionate hatred — even among so-called “conservatives.”

Until I can address those in a future article, allow me to recommend Ann Coulter’s Mugged, for all the reasons mentioned above and more.

This is one of those books that will have you yelling, “Honey, you have to hear this!” to your spouse, when you’re not shoving it under the nose of your irritating college age child when she comes home for Thanksgiving.

Here’s to having a frank discussion about race, prompted by Coulter’s mostly frank monologue in hardcover form.