Shelf Life.(Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right; Churchill's Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study ; Civilizing Sex: On Chastity and the Common Good; Why Jews Should Not Be Liberals)

'I'm not accusing you of being a bigot. I'm accusing you of being a fool. . . . I don't know if you're a bigot. I do know you're a fool." Thus spake James Carville to conservative columnist Ann Coulter on a recent segment of CNN's Crossfire shout show -- offering eloquent proof of the main thesis of Coulter's excellent new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown, 256 pp., $25.95). What Coulter contends, and proves through the deployment of massive amounts of footnoted evidence, is that the Left in the United States has been made so sluggish by years of dominance of the mainstream media that it has a great deal of difficulty in making coherent, intelligent arguments; it therefore resorts to labeling -- and often libeling -- dissenting views as "stupid," "crazy," and all manner of other vacant epithets that disguise the absence of any intellectual content in the labeler's attack.

Any fair-minded observer -- one who has no partisan ax to grind for either Coulter or Carville -- would have to recognize that Coulter is, at the very least, Carville's intellectual equal. Her 1998 book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, was probably the best of the anti-Clinton books (and boy, were there many); it was obviously written with a great deal of passion, but the real source of its strength -- and its usefulness -- was its painstaking marshaling of evidence. The same is true of this new book, which is an even more important work because it addresses a much broader issue, and one of more lasting significance.

Coulter is at her best in exposing the Left's double standards, which often shade over into outright hypocrisy. For example, according to the media stereotype, it's right-wingers who constitute the chief threat of censorship in the U.S. -- but Coulter finds that left-wing would-be censors get a free pass. She points out that a couple of weeks after the Lewinsky story broke on the Internet, Hillary Clinton expressed concern about the "accessibility and instantaneous information on the computer." Too much free speech! . . . Mrs. Clinton raised the need for some "kind of editing function or gate-keeping function" for the Internet. Saying, "It is just beyond imagination what can be disseminated," Mrs. Clinton said, "we are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this." There are, she announced, "competing values." To wit; her electoral viability versus the First Amendment. So the First Amendment's got to go, the children need her.

Marvelous, and devastating. Ask any educated American, and he will tell you that the rabid right-wingers are out to censor the Internet with their antiporn legislation; but of those same educated Americans, how many know that Hillary, too, that icon of liberal icons, wanted to censor the Internet? There's a reason they don't know, which is made clear in Coulter's book: Inconvenient facts, such as this one, simply don't fit the story the media want to tell.

Coulter is, in a sense, a victim of her own rhetorical brilliance: Her gift for phrasemaking occasionally distracts attention from some accomplishments of genuine intellectual substance. Don't be misled by the fact that so much of this book is fun to read.

n It's possible that someday, a thousand years hence, Winston Churchill will be remembered less for his heroic rallying of the West to win World War II than for his masterful books of history. After all, littera scripta manet: It is the page that endures.

Scholar Algis Valiunas has just published a valuable book about Churchill's literary achievement. Churchill's Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study (Rowman & Littlefield, 197 pp., $39.95) is an excellent introduction to the great man's ...