Let me start by being totally open here: I am generally a huge Ann Coulter fan. I read her columns, I used to catch as many of her television and radio appearances as I could, and I have owned every one of her books...and still have the vast majority of them. I even like, on the whole, her newest book Demonic. As usual, Ann skewers deeply held liberal beliefs, exposes them to the harsh light of reality, and holds them up to well deserved ridicule. The point of her newest book is to trace the liberal's embrace of mob action back to the French Revolution and how closely the current liberal mob mindset mirrors the attitudes, thoughts, and tactics of the leaders of that bloody revolt.

But sometimes, Ms. Ann runs off the rails a little bit and there are a couple of places in her book that I think exemplify this. And that's what prompted me to write this little post, because someone has to challenge her on these issues.

The first place where Ann runs off the rails is when she tries to make the case that the civil rights movement was the first time that America accepted and acquiesced to mob action. Now, she makes some valid points that since the Civil Rights Movement the left has tried to cast every one of their protests in the same moral light, even though they usually have no similarities at all. She also makes a valid point that in some instances, especially the decision to use children in the Birmingham march that was effectively Bull Connor's last stand, Martin Luther King Jr. put people in harms way to prove his point. As Ann points out in the book, by the time of the Birmingham march Bull Connor was on his way out of power in the city, with his position having been eliminated and having been totally defeated in the race for mayor. Connor's power was broken and the city's merchants had already agreed to begin desegregation...so there was no real point to the march, other than to provoke a bitter Connor into taking some violent action against the marchers. Where Ann goes wrong in my opinion, is when she equates these marches to mob actions. The riots you see whenever the left decides to protest a G-20 meeting is a mob action; windows are smashed, property damaged, police assaulted, and chaos reigns. But in the entire history of the Civil Rights marches of the 1950's and 60's, where are the examples of the marchers destroying businesses? Where is the example of a marcher attacking a police officer? Where are the images of the seething rage of the marchers as they attempted to physically intimidate those who disagreed with them? If you can find those images, post them here...because I haven't seen them. It seems that in trying to make a broader point about the left's prodigious use of mob action to get their way, Ann decided to rope the Civil Rights movement in...for what reason I don't pretend to understand. But to compare the marchers of the Civil Rights era, who peacefully exercised their rights to assemble and petition their government for redress of their legitimate grievances to the mobs of enviro-whackos and anti-capitalist thugs is just a bridge too far. The two are nothing alike, and trying to link them shows a bit of faulty reasoning to me.

Then there is Ann's decades long crusade to convince everyone that the five young men who were convicted and later exonerated of raping Trisha Meili in the infamous Central Park Jogger case are really guilty...in spite of the lack of physical evidence against them, the confession and DNA matching of convicted rapist-murderer Matias Reyes, and the decision of the very DA's office that led the original prosecution asking that the men's convictions be set aside and the original indictments be vacated. Ann instead takes the same line as a NYPD report ( that conveniently exonerated the department of any wrongdoing or unethical conduct ) that the confessions taken from these men at the time were enough to sustain the verdicts. She even argues that the fact that the men, boys at the time between the ages of 14 and 16, told different stories makes their confessions credible! According to Ann (and the NYPD report she so agrees with), it would have been extremely suspicious if the kids all told the same basic story about an event that they were all allegedly involved in!

Now, on some level I can understand that thought: if everyone tells the exact same story in the exact same words, you probably have a cooked up story on your hands. But that line of reasoning breaks down when you look at the events involved and the time that the kids were arrested. Four of the five eventual defendants were arrested within hours of the attacks, some within minutes of leaving the park. The  other eventual defendant was arrested later the next day as he returned to his family's apartment; the point is that even if these kids had told the same story, it wouldn't have been suspicious because they had not had time to fabricate any cover story. But as it was, the kids told wildly different stories, with one kid giving the cops four different statements...three coming after every time the cops were able to separate him from his family. Amazingly, the kids couldn't even agree on the basic events of the attack that they were alleged to have taken part in; they couldn't even agree on who hit the woman first! That would be like me, Brian, Crawfish, and Cynewulf being accused of ratpacking Alan Colmes, getting arrested, and then we give the cops four different stories. I say I did it; Brian says he didn't see it; Craw says Cyne did it; and Cyne names Scottie, Mrs AL, drpete, and Philosophocon! If you heard that, would you think that we did it, seeing as to how the four of us can't seem to figure out who did what? In what world does that type of inconsistency morph into believability?

Ann uses the exoneration of these five men as an example of mob action, because as people started to poke holes in the prosecution case,  the press started to raise questions about the actual innocence of the men, and the DA's office began to take an honest look at their own prosecution, momentum began to build for at least granting the men a new trial based on new evidence. But since when is trying to use the established justice system procedures an example of mob action? By the time the charges were dismissed against them, all but one of the men were already out of jail having completed their sentences. The only one still in prison was Raymond Santana, who was serving time for drug possession with intent.  He was released early because with the convictions having been vacated he had to be sentenced as a first time offender, so the time he had already served on that charge exceeded to sentence he would have received for the offense. So no "beasts" were released from prison to terrorize the population; instead the true beast was finally brought to justice.

But what I have to wonder is if Ann ever considered that the original convictions were the real result of a mob mentality? I mean, I remember the press that this case received back in the day: it was wall to wall, the biggest story on the networks. This was one of those high profile cases where the people were outraged, the mayor was apoplectic, and the NYPD was under pressure to get someone for the crime. They arrested a whole gang of kids who had been in the park that night, and managed to obtain confessions from five of them. The prosecutors office, driven by media and political pressures, were willing to do just about anything to gain a conviction. And they did, even though there was no physical evidence to link the five to the jogger; in fact the DNA evidence that they did have excluded any of the five as the attacker. You had a victim who was beaten to the point that she nearly bled to death from head wounds, yet none of the alleged attackers had any of her blood in her. Couldn't the rush to judgment and the media portrayals as the men as guilty simply for being accused have been a better example of the mob mentality? I don't know exactly what it is about this particular case pushes Ann's buttons so hard, but she might need to step back a bit  to reassess her position on this case, because the facts of the case don't support the dogmatic opinion that she holds here. The injustice wasn't that they were exonerated, but that they ever went to prison in the first place!

Now that concludes my rant, and it felt good to get that off my chest! I would still recommend her book to people, because for the most part it is good work...if you like Ann's style. But just know when you go into the chapter (!!) about the Central Park case that Ann has some serious issues working on this one that really warps her perspective on the case.