Godless: Tall, Blond and Utterly Obnoxious

I just finished listening to eleven CD's of Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. I heard the last disc this morning in the car while sitting in the worst traffic of the season on the HRD and the FDR trying to get down to East 59th street in the city.

After reading so much about the book after its release on 6/6/06 I just forgot about it. I'm not a fan of conservative screeds and that is how the book was presented by both its supporters and detractors. We finally got around to taking the book on CD out of the Teaneck library and started listening last week.

This has been a painful experience. It's not just that Coulter is wrong about plain facts or that she has plagiarized. She is against so many things it is hard to keep track. And they are not just little things like family planning. No she is against science and education too.

What bothered me the most was the absolute tone of sarcasm that pervades her writing. I'm certain that the commercial success of models of writing like this book -- a number one bestseller on the "non-fiction" bestseller list -- have a profoundly negative influence on civil discourse in our society. I worry about the toxic effect of this kind of writing on young people, especially those conservative bloggers who might want to emulate the Coulter formula.

The inane thesis that Coulter advances is that "Liberalism" is a religion, that public schools are its churches, that evolutionary biologists are its priests and so on and so on. She demonstrates in her choppy, non-sequiteur prose clearly that she understands nothing about religion, education, science and the like.

Critics have already taken the book apart and demolished it to smithereens (summary). Happily I can report no recollection of any significant passages related to Jews or Judaism from this awful treatise. So this book is very bad for everyone, not just for Jews.