If Democrats Had Any Brains Theyd Be Republicans or The Age of Lincoln

If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans

Author: Ann Coulter

“Uttering lines that send liberals into paroxysms of rage, otherwise known as ‘citing facts,’ is the spice of life. When I see the hot spittle flying from their mouths and the veins bulging and pulsing above their eyes, well, that’s when I feel truly alive.”

So begins If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, Ann Coulter’s funniest, most devastating, and, yes, most outrageous book to date.

Coulter has become the brightest star in the conservative firmament thanks to her razor-sharp reasoning and biting wit. Of course, practically any time she opens her mouth, liberal elites denounce Ann, insisting that “She’s gone too far!” and hopefully predicting that this time it will bring a crashing end to her career.

Now you can read all the quotes that have so outraged her enemies and so delighted her legions of fans. More than just the definitive collection of Coulterisms, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans includes dozens of brand-new commentaries written by Coulter and hundreds of never-before-published quotations. This is Ann at her best, covering every topic from A to Z. Here you’ll read Coulter’s take on:

• Her politics: “As far as I’m concerned, I’m a middle-of-the-road moderate and the rest of you are crazy.”
• Hillary Clinton: “Hillary wants to be the first woman president, which would also make her the first woman in a Clinton administration to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office instead of under it.”
• The environment: “God gave us the earth. Wehave dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”
• Religion: “It’s become increasingly difficult to distinguish the pronouncements of the Episcopal Church from the latest Madonna video.”
• Global warming: “The temperature of the planet has increased about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century. So imagine a summer afternoon when it’s 63 degrees and the next thing you know it’s . . . 64 degrees. Ahhhh!!!! Run for your lives, everybody! Women and children first!”
• Gun control: “Mass murderers apparently can’t read, since they are constantly shooting up ‘gun-free zones.’”
• Bill Clinton: “Bill Clinton’s library is the first one to ever feature an Adults Only section.”
• Illegal aliens: “I am the illegal alien of commentary. I will do the jokes that no one else will do.”

If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans is a must-have for anyone who loves (or loves to hate) Ann Coulter.

Book review: Rosa Parks or The Dictators Shadow

The Age of Lincoln

Author: Orville Vernon Burton

Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age’s most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation’s millennial aspirations.

America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president’s authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country.

Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.

Library Journal

Lincoln's real legacy? The idea that personal liberty really matters-and should be protected by law. From history professor and Pulitzer Prize nominee Burton. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Freeing the slaves was not the Great Emancipator's greatest legacy, argues Burton (History/Univ. of Illinois). Instead, this densely reasoned reappraisal contends, it was the vast expansion of federal power-pragmatically necessary to win the Civil War, but justified in ideological terms as the best means to protect personal freedom, something to which the government had hitherto paid little attention. Focusing on the half-century from the 1840s to the 1890s, Burton examines a fascinating reversal in the underlying premises maintained by abolitionists and proponents of slavery. As the nation surged across the continent, it seemed clear the United States enjoyed God's favor. The Constitution, enshrined in most Americans' view as the ordainer of principles almost supernatural in their wisdom, legitimated racial inequality, though it avoided the word slavery; slave owners believed they had the law of the land on their side. The early abolitionists, by contrast, appealed to a "higher law": the word of God. Confident of their political clout, slave owners rolled their eyes and ignored this lunatic fringe. By the 1850s, however, abolitionists realized they might achieve their goals through secular legislation, so divine justification became less essential. Simultaneously, southerners became convinced that the Bible sanctioned slavery and abolitionism was the Devil's work. They were now the ones pointing to a higher law, and unlike 1820s abolitionists they were in a position to cause major trouble. Burton emphasizes that Lincoln hijacked the South's appeal to religious principle without diminishing his reverence for the secular Constitution, a potent combination that gave his visionary fusion offederal power and individual rights the staying power to outlast its betrayal during and after Reconstruction. A history of ideas that adds little to our understanding of Civil War events but offers provocative thoughts about how Americans did or (mostly) did not live up to Lincoln's ideals.