LIBERAL VICTIMHOOD: A GAME YOU CAN PLAY AT HOME

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
January 28, 2009


I notice that liberals have not challenged the overall thesis of my rocketing bestseller, Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America, which is that liberals always play the victim in order to advance, win advantages and oppress others.

I guess that would be hard to do when the corrupt Democratic governor of Illinois is running around comparing himself to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
Indeed, you can't turn on the TV without seeing some liberal playing victim to score the game-winning point.

Caroline Kennedy tried to Bigfoot her way into New York's Senate seat while being bathed in the Kennedy light of eternal victimhood. The New York Times began a profile of Caroline by quoting an average citizen who "turns almost maternally protective" upon hearing Caroline's name, mentioning the assassination of her father -- nearly half a century ago.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews summarily announced: "We all want to be protective of Caroline Kennedy." When one of his guests, Michael Smerconish, merely asked what her qualifications were, an appalled Matthews said: "Wow."

Political reporter Ron Brownstein elaborated on "wow," saying: "Well, that's pretty rough. That's pretty rough. I mean, but she has got, at least publicly, a very private persona, one of quiet grace and elegance and intelligence."

The Times' City Room exercised its own protective function toward Caroline by censoring any indelicate inquiries about her on its blog.

The Kennedys are the textbook case of victims who go around victimizing others. As I describe in Guilty, in 1969, Times reporter James Reston began his story about Teddy Kennedy driving a girl off the Chappaquiddick bridge with the sentence: "Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family."

Reston waited a discreet four paragraphs before mentioning the name of the dead girl, whose "tragedy" was arguably greater. (Even the Times rewrote Reston's opening line.)

Caroline's expectation that she would sail past all other contenders and be handed a seat in the U.S. Senate is perfectly in keeping with her family tradition.

When Robert Kennedy won his Senate seat from New York, he unseated a well-liked Republican, Kenneth Barnard Keating, who had represented New York in Congress for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy hadn't lived in New York since he was 12 years old. But the allegedly sophisticated voters of New York were awed by the Kennedy name, and dumped a popular native son.

A deputy manager of Kennedy's campaign explained that the carpetbagger accusation could not withstand the image of JFK's assassination a year earlier: "You couldn't vote against Robert Kennedy without seeing the presence of John Kennedy."

With New York's record of swooning for celebrity victims, it was a snap for another carpetbagger, Hillary Clinton, to push aside veteran New York Democrats to win her Senate seat in 2000.

When Gov. David Paterson ended the Kennedy soap opera by appointing Democratic congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, her Democratic colleague, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, blanketed the airwaves, threatening to challenge Gillibrand in the next election because of her NRA-approved stand on guns.

McCarthy explained, "My voice is for the victims."

The only reason McCarthy was elected to Congress in the first place is that her husband and son were shot by a crazed gunman on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993. Colin Ferguson's shooting spree wasn't stopped sooner because none of the passengers had guns. As has been demonstrated beyond dispute at this point, armed citizens save lives.

In a comprehensive study of all public multiple shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that the only public policy that reduced both the incidence and casualties of such shootings were concealed-carry laws. Not only are there 60 percent fewer gun massacres after states adopt concealed-carry laws, but the death and injury rate of such rampages are reduced by 80 percent.

Rep. McCarthy claims to "speak for the victims" by promoting policies that will provably create a lot more victims.

And all of this occurs in a year when the mainstream media is agog with their discovery that a black man can be elected president in America! By being elected president, Obama overcame the massive racial hatred that existed only in liberal imaginations.

I don't know a single conservative who thought America wouldn't elect a black man.

If Republicans had run Colin Powell in 1996 -- back when he was a Republican -- he would have been the first black president. As Powell himself said, he received the strongest support from Southern white men, who admired his military background.

The first serious black candidate to run for president in America won, so blacks are one-for-one in a country liberals would have us believe is teeming with Ku Klux Klanners.

Throughout Obama's entire life, doors were opened for him, his college applications smiled upon and favors bestowed simply because he is black -- the original victim category in America. Being black is the highest victim caste because of blacks' authentic victimhood: The nation once tolerated slavery and Jim Crow.

But ironically, Obama's father is from Africa: He never suffered from the ancient policies that, today, give his son Victim Gold. To the contrary, if Obama's African relatives had anything to do with slavery, it was on the business end.