Daily Beast Review Of "Bullies": All Gas, No Fact

In the most cursory, superficial, trifling, desultory, half-assed, perfunctory, shallow, cut-rate, inadequate, insubstantial, meager,  rinky-dink review of a book ever written, Justin Green, writing on David Frum’s blog, called Ben Shapiro’s Bullies “less a book than a marketing campaign for the conservative rage movement.”

Not a word of Green’s review indicates he actually read the book; there is no quote, not even the slightest reference to even a chapter. The entire review reads like Schroeder’s Book Report in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, in which Schroeder evades reporting on the book Peter Rabbit and somehow veers onto the story of Robin Hood.

That’s Green’s take; he resorts to calumnies like these:

A decent book is an opportunity to probe problems with insightful questions, serious self-reflection and forthright intellectual honesty. Bullies neither attempts these tasks nor recognizes they exist.

Say what? Shapiro examines the entire corpus of Leftist institutional bullying, from race bullies to sex bullies, from environment bullies to class bullies, on and on, but because he doesn’t engage in “serious self-reflection” (a masturbatory phrase in the hands of the Left if ever there was one) his isn’t a good book?

But then Green ratchets up the whining:

Bullies exists to perpetuate conservative culture warfare. This warfare has little to do with ideas and policy – and everything to do with the bottom line. The only surprise about a book like Bullies is the question: How much longer till the audience gets tired of hearing the same message over and over and over again?

How about this, dunderhead? Try reading the book and making a cogent argument against it. Criticism 101: Class #1: Read the Book.

Then we get a snarky paragraph reminding us who won the election, but still no substantive criticism:

Then November 6 happened. The guy Breitbart.com, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and crew had said was incompetent, shadowy, dangerous for America, and actually deeply unpopular won a second term in quite convincing fashion. As the house of cards crumbled, a darkly amusing idea made its way through conservatives circles: Mitt Romney had lost because he was too moderate, too unwilling to take the fight to President Obama, and too willing to be bullied.

Green is so ignorant he misses Shapiro’s entire point: the Right had been cowed into submission long before Mitt Romney’s defeat. Romney’s defeat was the culmination of an era in which conservatives were bullied, not the beginning.

Green’s review is typical of the Left: all style, no substance. Or, as we used to say when I was young, as much air as you’d get from a horse’s behind.