More screed than book
Was there anything at all I liked about this book? Anything positive I could say about it? Well, it was short, and that’s no small thing but as short as it was, it was a stern test of my resolve, to finish any and all books I started.
Disclosure – I skipped a section in the middle, page after page of mean things folks said about Michelle on her website (hello, it’s the Internet,) and I skimmed, OK, raced through the final 20 or so pages, not sure until the very end if I’d finish it or just throw it across the room.
A few years ago I tried to read one of Rush Limbaugh’s books. The Limbaugh book was long, really long, and I tried and couldn’t make it to the end. It was that awful. The theme - I’m the great Rush Limbaugh, here to tell you what to think and with my inimical humorous way of putting things, you know, that gift from God thing, you’ll be informed even as you’re entertained. It didn’t work for me. Rush is what the World Wrestling Federation used to be, before it was unmasked – serious sport or entertainment, depending on what best suited it at the moment and not so good, in this reviewers opinion, at either. The lesson I got from it was never again.
Until I decided to do it again.
The theme of Malkin’s book is simple enough, and hard to miss, with the way she beats you over the head with it. Liberals are deranged, violent folks who hate America; Conservatives (I only use the word because they use it) are God-fearing patriotic Americans under assault from the (who else,) deranged Liberals.
I finished the book in an afternoon, and not because I couldn’t put it down. I could, and did, a lot, but I was determined to make it to the end and it was a Saturday and I usually give Saturdays over to soft-reading - swashbucklers, Westerns, and I couldn’t escape the nagging injustice - I didn’t deserve to be reading a political diatribe on a Saturday afternoon.
The book was written in 2005 so it’s maybe not fair to review it now, it’s a book about the situation in America nearly ten years ago and things change, oh, do they change. If Liberals were angry and deranged back then, who’s deranged now, in 2013?
Why were the Liberals so angry? Well, 2 presidential elections, one ending when they stopped counting the votes, SCOTUS’s decision robbing President Bush of the legitimacy he might otherwise have had and robbing SCOTUS of legitimacy too. Folks who crowed when the court put their man in the White House might better have taken a more sober look. There were legitimate questions raised about the 2004 election too, particularly in Ohio, and the war in Iraq? Something fishy there. These were just some of the sources of left-wing anger in 2005, none of which the book explores. The book only looks at how angry the Liberals were, or were presumed to be, and doesn’t ask why.
It’s anecdote piled on top of anecdote. It’s proof, in case you didn’t get it from the Introduction or from the back cover, of just how unhinged Liberals had become. All those rampaging violent left-wingers and who are the victims? Conservatives. Make that God-fearing, rational, peace-loving Conservatives. The book is also filled with apologies. The anecdotes end with the Liberals apologizing or stubbornly refusing to apologize when an apology is clearly in order.
I suppose it might have made the book somewhat more bearable had Michelle been witty or clever, but her zingers are snarky-ugly, (even as she quotes ad nauseum, the ugly things she has to endure.) Again, the Internet can be a very ugly place.
Her barbs lack zing.
A sample:
A college kid throws a pie at Ann Coulter and Coulter gives the kid what Michelle calls a “trademark verbal lashing.” You know that Ann and her rapier wit. The lashing goes like this: “From that far away and he can’t even hit me?” (The kid was apparently up close to the podium.) Hey, I’ve never thrown a pie at anyone but I imagine it’s difficult to actually hit a person with a pie, without smushing it in their face. It’s not like throwing a Frisbee or a shoe. To actually hit someone in the face with a vertical and not a horizontal pie, would require the pie to travel or at least alight, in a kind of stand-up position, which I suppose is aerodynamically impossible.
Anyway, that’s not much of a lashing and maybe there was more to it but that’s all we got. Michelle can give over page after page to all the nasty things people say about her and she can’t give us a taste of Ann Coulter’s trademark wit? Guess we’ll just have to take her word for it.
Then there’s the bit about Ward Churchill. Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado, had much to say about the 9-11 attacks, some of it pretty outrageous, but none of it, in my opinion, outside the bounds of allowable speech. Couldn’t the freedom-loving, always fair-minded Conservatives have stood for the man’s freedom, if not for the man? Instead, they pilloried Churchill, harassing and hounding him until he lost his position at the university for reasons that had nothing to do with his 9-11 comments, reasons some feel were excuses.
What I most hated about the book wasn’t the politics. Michelle is syndicated in my local daily so I knew exactly what I was getting into before I checked the book out of the library. What I most hated was how tiresome it was. You want to make the case the Liberals are deranged, fine, go for it, but the next time could we have a little more in the way of analysis and not so many anecdotes? Why are they angry? Aren’t you curious? Don’t you care? Or are you content speaking just to the folks who think the way you do? Is what you’re doing nothing more than confirming and rousing their indignation? But, wait. Your audience is conservative and those folks aren’t angry, are they? Lighten up, Michelle. I know plenty of Liberals and they’re not all angry and deranged.