Coulter: Liberals are assaulting America

Daddy was diving repeatedly into ground zero — when he was nowhere near the place. The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist” told sickening tales about the brutish behavior of American troops in Iraq–and then he signed an affidavit admitting he made it all up. John Edwards was the loyal husband to his cancer-stricken wife–except it turned out he was carrying on an extended affair with Rielle Hunter.

The Democrats dredge up victim after victim, but it’s hard to find one real story. Why do liberals keep coming up with hoaxes for our edification? Time and again, liberals transform themselves into chaste Victorian virgins fainting over the suffering of their victim du jour — but then the facts come out, and liberals react like Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live: “Never mind.”

You know you’ve really made it in America when the Left weeps for you. But this much-sought-after victim status is evanescent, lasting only as long as the fake victim’s bellyaching advances the liberal agenda. Poor, long-suffering Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, Scott Ritter, Cindy Sheehan, the Jersey Girls, Scott McClellan — all putative victims of the Republicans — weep alone these days. The liberal establishment has moved on.

It’s so popular to be a victim in modern American society that people are constantly faking their own hard-luck stories — and not just in the “personal statement” essay in their Harvard applications. Among the recent hoax memoirs was one in 2008 by “Margaret B. Jones” called “Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival.” Jones claimed to be a half-white, half-Native American girl who grew up in a foster home in South Central Los Angeles, raised by an African American mother. She said she ran drugs for the Bloods in the middle of the deadly crack wars of the 1980s, losing her foster brother to the gang wars. Jones gave interviews using an urban black patois, referring to her fellow gang members as her “homies.” In her book she passed on urban wisdom, such as “Trust no one. Even your own momma will sell you out for the right price or if she gets scared enough.”

But then it turned out Margaret Jones was really Peggy Seltzer, a suburban Valley Girl, who grew up with her biological family in affluent Sherman Oaks, Calif., where she attended a private day school. The closest she had come to the projects was watching Project Runway on Bravo. Her hoax was exposed when her sister, Cyndi Hoffman, called the publisher after seeing Seltzer’s photo by a book review in the New York Times — which praised the book as a “humane and deeply affecting memoir.”

Video   Coulter: ‘Next 4 years will surprise us’ Jan. 7: TODAY’s Matt Lauer talks to conservative commentator Ann Coulter about President-elect Obama and her new book, “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America.” Today show

Even when caught red-handed, Seltzer claimed to be serving a greater good: “I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to.” She said others had told her “you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk.” Admitting it was “an ego thing,” she explained, “I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Also in 2008, a Holocaust memoir published in 1997 was exposed as a hoax. In the book, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” Misha Defonseca described her parents being arrested and deported by the Nazis when she was six years old. She wrote that she went to live with the De Wael family, who gave her the name “Monique,” but she so missed her parents that she embarked on a trans-European trek to find them. Wandering alone throughout Europe, she said she killed a German soldier, was sheltered by a pack of wolves, and saw a train full of Jews headed for the death chamber. So her story was believable.

The memoir was a smash bestseller in Europe and Canada and was on its way to a triumphant success in the United States with both Oprah and Disney expressing interest in the book. But a money dispute with the publisher delayed negotiations — and in the meantime the book was exposed as a fraud.

Defonseca really had been born “Monique De Wael,” a Belgian Catholic, whose parents were arrested and later executed by the Nazis for being part of the Belgian Catholic resistance. Defonseca had never gone in search of her parents. To the contrary, she renounced the name of her brave Nazi-resisting parents, saying she had “wanted to forget” her real name since she was four years old because she had been called “daughter of a traitor” after her parents were arrested. She added that all her life she “felt Jewish ... it was my reality, my way of surviving.” In short, she did everything she could think of to sound more Jewish but complain about being seated too close to the air conditioner.

Another award-winning Holocaust memoir, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood,” was published in 1995 and — although it was never an official selection of Oprah’s Book Club — was exposed as a hoax by 1999. Wilkomirski claimed to have survived Nazi concentration camps as a small boy, drawing gruesome tales of watching his mother die, rats crawling out of dead bodies, and children eating their own fingers. Genealogists later established that he was the illegitimate child of a Protestant woman, and he had spent the war years safely ensconced in Switzerland with his adoptive parents.

This literary Munchausen syndrome produces Jewish girls trying to be black and gentiles claiming to be Jewish Holocaust survivors. So naturally, when a con artist threesome sought fame and fortune in America, they invented a young fiction author by the name of JT LeRoy, who was a cross-dressing child prostitute, drug addict, vagrant, and AIDS victim. Among the fake transgendered prostitute’s celebrity entourage were Lou Reed, Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Tatum O’Neal, Debbie Harry, Madonna, and Liv Tyler — all of whom, when assembled under one roof, conveniently constitute a quorum for a 12-step meeting.

The con artist LeRoy explained his attraction to celebrities, saying, “Artists want to hang out with other artists because that’s the language they talk” — which may have been the truest thing “he” said. The nonexistent LeRoy was celebrated in a glamorous write-up in Vanity Fair, a glowing profile in the New York Times, and a song, “Cherry Lips,” by Shirley Manson — a trio of honors known in the Hamptons as a “hat trick.” A fawning piece in the Boston Globe said of LeRoy’s hard-luck stories, the “perversity of religious fundamentalists is a near constant in American gothic writing.” Everything always changes, except the avant-garde, which is always the same.

Reprinted from “Guilty” by Ann Coulter. Copyright © 2009 Ann Coulter. Published by Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.

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