BOOK EXCERPTS

"There are confounding and contradictory myths about the typical Republican. He is both the gun-toting hick, driving barefoot and shirtless in his pickup truck, and the loafer-wearing WASP, sipping scotch on a yacht or lounging in the polo club. The latter stereotype may include the benefits of sophistication and wealth, but by no means extends to likeability. CNN Headline News pundit and radio personality Glenn Beck said of this contradictory imagining of the Republican elite by the left, 'When you think of red states, do you think of homes on Central Park and in the Hollywood Hills, or do you think of stupid, redneck hicks in Oklahoma? The media can't have it both ways. There is only one elite, and it's the left, and that's why the Democrats have solidly lost their connection to the Democrats that were like my grandparents."

"The conservative who hasn't faced the Disbelieving Liberal hasn't gotten out much. The DL is, after all, everywhere. He is on planes and trains, in restaurants and bars, in classrooms and office lunchrooms, and he just...can't...believe...('Are you serious?!') that you, his drinking buddy, his ballgame buddy, the guy he discusses sexual misadventures with, are a conservative. And after grilling you on your stand on assorted political issues (and then running to the bathroom to wash his hands) he will leave you, betrayed and shocked, as if he just found out he was adopted."

"Perhaps no stereotype about conservatives is more indelible, more recognizable, evoked with more regularity, and uttered with more passion (and less evidence) than the myth of the uncaring Republican, his heart as black as an oil spill in an endangered seal preserve, eyes as steely and piercing as a razor blade in a piece of Halloween candy, and blood cold as a glacier untouched by the ravages of global warming. Republcians are routinely painted as uncaring, unfeeling, stoic, and sober. We joke that Dick Cheney's heart problems stem from his not actually having one. And we hypothesize that Republican policy, domestic and foreign, is born of a severely misanthropic, even homicidal, urge to effect on a national scale the kind of tone set at a funeral for a school bus accident."

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