Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, receives some of the best reviews yet for the series. Critics have not only liked the story line but also Rowling’s writing style. The series of books are continuing to receive complaints and opposition from Christian organizations for being evil. So far, the opposition hasn’t seemed to hurt sales. More on this issue later.
The First Lady whom people either love to love or hate, Hillary Clinton, published her second book Living History, which sold a record one million copies in its first month. This memoir takes us inside HRC’s eight years in the White House, including the months following her husband’s infidelity with Monica Lewinsky.
Conservative CNN talk show celebrity for Crossfire, Tucker Carlson, prior to the release of the book, made the comment on air that he would eat his shoe if Hillary’s book sold over one million copies. Just over one month after its release, the publishers Simon & Schuster published the news that History had just surpassed the one-million sold mark and was continuing to sell strong.
This very day, HRC showed up on Crossfire with a large cake made into the shape of a shoe for Tucker to eat. "I really want you to notice, Tucker, that this is a wingtip," Clinton joked. "It's a right wingtip."
On the polar opposite is the follow-up release by Ann Coulter, titled Treason. Last summer, Coulter released Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. Now, after a year of Democrats questioning Bush’s logic for war and millions of anti-war marches and sit-ins, Coulter raises the bar on her own misuse of tact by denouncing liberals as treasonous in the best-selling book of this title.
Venom such as this is not uncommon for her and her like and rarely deserves this attention. However, what is noteworthy is how this strange GOP Barbie Doll, who has enjoyed the limelight of the political analyst media landscape and the cult following of the conservative masses over the past few years, has possibly become too mean-spirited that she has lost what legitimacy she had with the moderate, logical faction of the GOP. She may have painted herself into a corner where only neo-cons and extremists reside. And in times such as these, when the legitimacy of the Iraq war weighs heavy on the American populace, the mainstream GOP doesn’t want the image of McCarthy-loving Coulter becoming the poster-child of what and who they are.
So poisonous have been her attacks, that she was fired by the National Review. And, her new book has not been received well by many popular conservative media celebrities. Sam Tanenhaus, in a book review for Slate online magazine, revealed that Treason not only had the liberals up in arms but the conservatives as well, naming David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, among others.
Tanenhaus writes: "All Coulter has done is import this [sham charge] approach—the flat_out accusatory style of hardball politics—into the realm of serious political discourse, ignoring the preferred arts of indirection and innuendo. And that's why her critics are agitated. It all comes down to tact—or tactics....[Indeed] the indelicate Coulter has crossed the line, stating openly the message others push subliminally."
