Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies

What It Is

A reference book, published in 2006 by JAJ Publishing, with the full title Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies: Issue by Issue Responses to the Most Common Claims of the Left from A to Z. Gregg Jackson was a Boston talk-radio host, and the book is the printed form of what he did on air.

The structure is the argument. Each chapter takes an issue, states a claim it attributes to the left, and answers with quotations, figures and footnotes. Abortion, taxes, gun control, immigration, church and state, media bias, education. It carried endorsements from Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and David Limbaugh, which places it precisely in the intellectual neighbourhood it came from.

Why It Matters

It is a primary source. The mid-2000s American right, at the end of the Bush presidency and at the height of talk radio's reach, is a period that gets described far more often than it gets read, and this is what its argument culture actually looked like from inside. Anyone trying to understand how a very large part of the country reasoned in that decade will learn more from an hour with Jackson than from a shelf of commentary about him.

The genre itself is worth attention. The rebuttal manual assumes that political disagreement is at bottom a dispute about facts, and that the facts can be settled by citation. The left produces the same book under different titles, with the same confidence.

It has lasted because it is useful. It tells a reader what to say, and books that do a job stay in print.

The weaknesses are structural, and worth stating plainly. The framing does the arguing before the evidence arrives: to call the other side's positions lies is to assume in the title what the chapters are meant to demonstrate, and a reader who does not already agree will have left the room by page two. The evidence is selected by an advocate, and the chapters rarely meet the strongest version of the opposing case. That is the genre's method rather than Jackson's private failing, and it limits what the book can be said to have settled. And it has never been revised: the statistics, the court cases and the examples stop in 2006, and on same-sex marriage, health care and Iraq the ground has moved so far that several chapters now read as history.

Before You Read

A few hundred pages, five or six hours if you read it straight through, which you should not. Use the contents page. Take the issues you actually care about and leave the rest.

Read it with a search engine open. The book's whole claim to authority is its documentation, and checking a footnote is not a hostile act; it is what a book like this invites.

If you are on the left, this is the most efficient way to hear the case against you stated by someone who believes it. You will find the places where it is stronger than you expected, and the places where it is weaker.

Which Edition to Read

• The JAJ Publishing paperback, 2006 — recommended. The only complete text there is, and the format the book was designed for: something you mark up, dog-ear and argue with in the margins. The cost: it is a small-press production and the typography shows it, and it has never been updated, so you are buying a document of 2006 at 2006's state of knowledge. View on Amazon →
• The ebook. For a reference book, search beats an index, and this is a book you will want to interrogate rather than read. The cost: hard to annotate properly, and the footnotes are awkward on a small screen.
• Used copies. Plentiful and very cheap. Printings differ in nothing material.

Get the ebook if you will use it as a reference, the paperback if you want to fight with it in pencil. There is no annotated edition, no revised edition and no collectible edition.

Buy Sowell's A Conflict of Visions at the same time. It is the philosophical account of which this book is the practical end, and reading them together shows you the difference between an argument and an arsenal.

Getting the Most From This Book

Start with a chapter on an issue where you already know the literature well. How the book performs on ground you can judge tells you how far to trust it on ground you cannot. It is the single most useful thing you can do with any book of this kind, and almost nobody does it.

Follow the footnotes rather than admiring them.

Read the strongest opposing case on any issue where the book convinces you. A rebuttal manual is engineered to be convincing in the absence of a rebuttal.

The commonest mistake is to read this as a book. It is a tool, and tools are judged by what they build.