S.E. Cupp has appeared, by her own reckoning, on CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, FOX News, Al Harra, Hannity, Geraldo, Red Eye and "dozens of radio shows" including Dennis Miller, Curtis Sliwa, Mancow and Bubba the Love Sponge. She's been published in the New York Daily News, Washington Post, Newsmax, Slate, Human Events, American Spectator, Townhall and Maxim online. So it follows that she's writing a book called Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity.
That damn liberal media. They won't let anyone else get a word in edgewise.
Ms. Cupp also says she's an atheist, so I don't exactly know how she has a dog in this fight, but what the hell. No one's crapped out a book with the words "liberal" "media" "attack" and "Christianity" in at least a month. Perhaps it's just her turn.
Why keep writing this book? Why not just go to the homes of the credulous and beat the shit out of them and take their money?
So what kind of hard hitting anti-anti-Christian muckraking will culture warriors get for their $25 bucks when Losing Our Religion comes out this Spring? We don't know. (But watch out, Glee.) S.E. Cupp puts a lot of sweaty effort into letting you know she's a goodtime gal and a thinker. (It's so creepy when she talks about sports, like getting side boob from George Will.) But judging by her columns, her thesis will be pursued with the intellectual rigor of Glenn Beck reading Chariots of the Gods.
Here's one of her columns now:
Jihadism Doesn't Want Converts - It Wants Scalps
Remember when Islamist terrorism wasn't just about exploding underwear, but religious conversion?
Of course you don't, because that was a really long time ago.
Spunky!
But transport yourself a few centuries back - and religious fanatics like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wouldn't have simply tried to blow us up.
What do you mean "us?" I thought I was just transporting myself. Who invited you? How do you lose track of the object in a sentence this simple?
First, they would have given us the chance to convert to Islam. It was a last-minute stay of execution, a way to escape certain death.
Not what "stay" means, but okay.
Considering the thousands murdered on 9/11 and since - people who never had the option - it was a pretty good deal.
"Us" deaths in Iraq since 2003: 4,373"Islamist" deaths from violence in Iraq since 2003: 95,021
Not to say it was very much fun. Not if you were a Coptic Egyptian in the 13th century, when members of the Mamluk Dynasty forcibly converted countless of your brethren to Islam.
Never mind Iraq. Have you forgotten Egypt under the Mamluks? I'm pretty sure there's a Darryl Worley song about it. Ms. Cupp doesn't mention -- doesn't care/doesn't know -- that this terrible act of unprovoked Islamist fanaticism occurred after about a hundred years of Crusades. I don't want to be one of those liberals who always blames Edward I first, but this might have been a factor.
Or if you were Catholic in 1480, when the Italian city of Otranto was invaded by the Ottomans and nearly 1,000 of your neighbors who refused to convert were beheaded on the Hill of Minerva.
There weren't "nearly 1,000" Martyrs of Otranto. There were 800. That's why we call them The 800 Martyrs of Otranto. Calling them "nearly 1,000" is like calling The Magnificent Seven "The Magnificent More or Less Ten." It's not just a needlessly imprecise exaggeration -- Martyrs in the four figures!? Now I'm really pissed off! -- it's the kind of thing a lazy undergrad changes when she's plagiarizing the encyclopedia.
Or if you were a British merchant seaman in the early 1800s, when Islamic pirates from the Barbary Coast captured, imprisoned and slave-traded more than 1 million European Christians...
Yes, that's right. One million white slaves in Africa in 1812. That's how they got country music.
This is the kind of black-is-white stat that TV conservatives love to drop to confuse Alan Colmes. All he has is a general sense from the preponderance of evidence vouched for by all historians, everywhere. S.E. Cupp has one book from 2005 called Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters.
Its author, Robert Davis, concedes that everyone else who's ever written a word about Barbary Coast piracy puts the number of Christian slaves at a few thousand. He also admits that he doesn't have any new evidence besides some math he did in his head: "The only way I could come up with hard numbers is to turn the whole problem upside down." Davis' -- oh, let's call it a theory -- has been accepted by, well, no one. That's good enough for S.E. Cupp.
And she even fucks that up. Davis' million slaves were captured over 300 years, between 1500 and 1800. Cupp's million white people are enslaved "in the early 1800s." This is not the same thing. This is a liar who doesn't even know what she's lying about.
I can't wait for the book.