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Request to Ann Coulter:
Put Up... or Shut Up!
by Chris Andersen

Tuesday, March 28, 2000 (AmpolNS) -- It is amazing how many "critics" out there think that nitpicking (combined with a bit of browbeating) is sufficient to refute a story that they don't particularly like. Case in point, the reaction to Jeffrey Toobin's book A Vast Conspiracy.

Mickey Kaus, a self-proclaimed friend of Michael Isikoff, has published a series of such nitpick reviews in his column on Slate. Instead of addressing the substance of Toobin's book, Kaus considers simply demonstrating a few factual errors to be sufficient to consign this book to the dustbin of history.

Then along comes Michael Isikoff himself to join in the nitpick parade over on TomPaine.com. Isikoff nibbles on the periphery and then proclaims the work to be "riddled with sloppy errors and grotesque distortions", a strong statement that he does little to back up.

And now Ann Coulter, Ms. "Constitutional Expert", weighs in with a bitchslap in the March 13 edition of Jewish World Review.

Coulter devotes the first half of her screed talking about an inconsequential mistake in Toobin's book where he says "Russell Senate Office" building when it should have been "Hart Senate Office" building.

Big whoopy-do!

She then alleges more serious falsehoods on Toobin's part while assiduously avoiding saying what the truth actually is that "refutes" those falsehoods. For example:

On Page 214, Toobin describes the activities of Jim Moody on Thursday, Jan. 15, 1998 -- activities that, as Toobin sinisterly states, were "unknown" to one of Paula Jones' lawyers, Wes Holmes: "Unknown to Holmes, Moody was just that day collecting the [Tripp] tapes from Kirby Behre, playing them for Isikoff, and his colleagues at Newsweek, and then taking them to Ann Coulter's apartment to listen to them ..." It's true Holmes didn't know that, but only because he knew what really happened, and that's not it. This chronology is not only false, but rather famously so. Indeed, Toobin's chronology makes no sense, except as an effort to suggest some sort of dark, devious -- and incomprehensible -- motive on the part of Tripp's lawyer, Jim Moody. I don't know what the diabolic motive might be, though my guess is, it somehow inures to the greater glory of Bill Clinton. I'm not really interested in reading the surrounding sentences to find out. Suffice it to say that Toobin's timeline is demonstrably false.

Read that again. Then read it again. Now read it one more time, even more carefully.

Notice anything missing?

Yep. Coulter never bothers to explain what the real chronology is that refutes the one that Toobin presents.

Suffice it to say, saying "suffice it to say" is not sufficient refutation.

And of course Coulter has to get in a dig that anyone who cast aspersions on the elves must be doing so in order to ingratiate themselves with Clinton.

Then there's this:

In a series of other inconsequential but reliably false references to Moody, Toobin states "Moody lived by himself" and "despised Democrats in general." Moody has not lived by himself since graduating from college, and the woman he currently lives with is a liberal Democrat (for some reason, almost all his friends are). Moody came in to the case, Toobin says, when New York lawyer George Conway "remembered an old friend in Washington" -- Jim Moody. George Conway barely knew Jim Moody; the two had met only briefly once or twice before in group settings. It certainly was not George Conway who thought of suggesting his name to Tripp.

Again, read this several times and you will notice something missing: she never says who it was who DID think of suggesting Moody.

Ann, baby, if Toobin got it SOOOOOOoooooo wrong, you could address this very simply: explain what DID happen?

After all, you know don't you?

Don't you?