Blondes in Black and the Doctrine of Infallibility

"Why haven't you written anything about Ann Coulter's new book?"

So asked a neighbor Wednesday night wondering why I had ignored the only media frenzy able to put Duke's Lacrosse Team scandal to bed: the publicity melee that has made Godless: The Church of Liberalism a best seller.

I heard Ann Coulter on Sean Hannity's talk show, saw the interview with The Today Show's host Matt Lauer, read Hillary Clinton's comments (and Ann's reply) and browsed the video archives at MSNBC but none of it was inspiring. But finally, nine days after releasing the book and criticisms of her being mean to the "Jersey Girls" (four wives whose husbands died September 11, 2001) I found something interesting.

Ann Coulter was a guest Wednesday night on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Jay Leno was the first interviewer not distracted by her witty sardonics and asked the question Lou Dobbs and Matt Lauer should have asked:

LENO: ".. the words you've used have overshadowed the point you were trying to make to the point people are upset about you attacking the widows [and miss] the point you were trying to make."

COULTER: "Other people have written acerbic little remarks about democrats sending out victims.. making the exact same points Howard Dean could be making ... I don't think the nation's attention has ever been riveted on this "victim as spokesman" as it has in the last week. I don't think that trick's going to work anymore."

Leave it to a comedian to conduct the tough interviews.

The reason the media and press have exploited the most trivial aspects of her new book is they, and the nation, aren't prepared to discuss the point of the chapter those comments are extracted from: The Doctrine of Infallibility. As ground shaking ideas go, criticizing liberals for parading victims as spokesmen is small potatoes compared to the writings of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele.

Sowell's book, Black Redneck's and White Liberals, explodes myths about black culture, slavery, black education, and their progress since the civil rights movement. The media and black leaders don't want these ideas discussed--at all. The thoroughly researched facts in his book controvert commonly held beliefs that have become the foundation of all civil rights dialog since the 60s. So commonly held that black culture's propaganda has become more real than the history it's fictionalized, and with the help of white liberals, is trying to rewrite.

In White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Shelby Steele proposes Affirmative Action (and all racial preferences the MCRI proposes to eliminate) is little more than the new slavery. Blacks, still unable to care for themselves, are dependent on the hand-outs of white people and white liberals promote it because Affirmative Action proves they aren't racists.

The fact neither book has drawn wide and loud criticism substantiates Ann Coulter's doctrine of infallibility. Both Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele are black writers. The popular media won't engage them because even journalistic action heroes like Lauer, Couric, Dobbs, and others are unable to match their intellect, command of history, but more importantly--they won't attack them because the authors are victims. Why are they victims? Because they're black.

The litmus test for being black required one to accept racial victimization not as an occasional event in one's life but as an ongoing identity. When victimization is identity, then the victim's passionate anger can be called out even when there is no actual victimization.

Shelby Steele -- White Guilt

The words of Sowell and Steele are more powerful accusations than anything Coulter has written, and yet nary a peep is heard. Nor will any be heard because both authors have lifted a mirror few, black or white, want to look into.