10 for 14--and the one's I missed I was shocked about--really kinda scary...

Pastime, Matt.

I got 9 out of 14.

What has Ann Coulter ever done to try and repay the country that affords her a very nice life?

She refuses to entertain the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even Rush Limbaugh went to Afghanistan once. That traiterous liberal coward, Al Franken, has been to Iraq at least three times.

Coulter refuses to visit the troops at Walter Reed Hospital.

She never performs on behalf of any worthwhile organization nor has she ever made any newsworthy contributions to charity.

Changing the subject, I want to praise the hard work of those marvelous "Jersey Girls". Without their dedication to the truth, Americans would have no official historical record of who planned the 9/11 attacks and how they were carried out.

I think the 9/11 Commission Report created more questions than it answered but, thanks to the broads living large off their dead husbands, those of us interested in the nation's most spectacular and successful terrorist attack have a reference and a starting point.

Those wanton widows took on the president of the United States and won. Three cheers and a big bouqet of flowers for the Jersey Girls!

14/14, and I am no Hitler scholar. I mostly ignored the content and focused on style.

If one feels the uncontrollable desire to give The Coulter more buzz by discussing her, my humble opinion is that your type of post is absolutely the best way to go about it, like a herpetologist cooly inspecting a specimen & its effect on the surrounding environment, no emotion involved.

:-)

One benefit among many in this approach is that it will madden The Coulter, as her goal is to get an emotional rise, and instead you bounce it back at her. (Never give The Coulter the anger she desires to see, instead demean with cool deconstruction or by vilifying with dismissive humor.)

Here's an oldie but goodie deconstruction for cool-minded researchers of The Coulter (which I dragged up through the wonders of what google can do if it involves something I once posted under my odd user name,) a July 2003 NY Times Style Section piece, filled with highly recommended delicious bits and pieces:

Blond Lightning on the Far Right by DAVID CARR

One fun quote:

Hatred moves units, and Ms. Coulter has the best-selling books to prove it.

(Those without NYT subscription shouldn't hestitate to click as I have used the permanent free access blog-safe url.)

I got everything right but one, mostly by just following the style difference.

Will she, some day, adopt the mustache?

More seriously, a more appropriate Nazi comparison might be to Julius Streicher. His newspaper, Der Sturmer, was even more shrill than Hitler, but also had a high sexual content. She may not be quite as pornographic, but she definitely uses physical appeal as part of her presentation; she can get away with saying things on TV that might well be unacceptable from Rush Limbaugh.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

For one thing, they have distinctive attitudes toward the question of the bourgeoisie. For Hitler, liberals are bourgeois (Hitler was, it's worth recalling, using liberal in the broader, European sense) and that's part of the problem. Coulter, by contrast, sees liberals as assaulting bourgeois values that she's defending.

Right-wingers like Coulter like to claim that they're defending bourgeois values.  But they're really defending the ephemera of bourgeois life, along with the pre-bourgeois traditions that middle-class life incorporated. 

In other words, liberalim in the broader, European sense has a lot in common with American liberalism today.  The old European Right complained that the bourgeois liberalism of its time and place rejected tradition, authority, and patriotism.  The newer American Right has basically the same critique of today's American liberalism.

Did you ever read about the Nazi camp commander who made naked Jews get on their hands and knees and eat grass in his yard? Ann Coulter wants me to cut her lawn.

Well, I'm not doing it.

Die, bitch!

demean with cool deconstruction or by vilifying with dismissive humor

Yeah, a lot of times I think just laughing is the best/sanest response.  Cool deconstruction is good too, although sometimes the multi-layered mazes of illogic that one must deconstruct can be crazy-making...

I've read a lot of books about Hitler, Hitler speeches, etc.

I wonder how many of us amateur political junkie types (and mebbe the professionals like MY?) got our political OCD triggered by Hitler/WWII...

I know that learning about WWII in, what, the fifth grade? -- really got under my skin -- made me a bit obsessed with trying to understand how Hitler came to power, and, more generally, with figuring out what politicians were doing in my name.

Funny you should mention Rush Limbaugh in the '80s and '90s. In 1990, I sat next to him on a Sunday morning flight from Asheville to NYC. I had no idea who he was then. I was reading Safire's column in the magazine section when he leaned over and said that he didn't think anyone ever actually read the Times.

He was quite charming and offered his limo to take me home when we landed but I said no thanks, I had my own. He took my work address and sent me an Excellence in Broadcasting videotape of one of his performances in California.

I was on my way to Australia at the time and never got back to him. A couple of months after 9/11, I finally decided to watch the tape and to my surprise, he was quite entertaining and his performance was lighthearted. Clarence the Frogman was his second banana and Rush was so sincere-sounding that he almost convinced me that women did not belong in combat.

Once in awhile, I wonder why he changed so much and became so vicious and meanspirited. I suppose the money had a great deal to do with it. But he must have been thrilled with the unstinting praise from the right and the power that came with it.

The other day, I posted in my blog here in the TPM Cafe about Rush Limbaugh's charitable foundation and theorized that some of the grants to individuals "in need" were actually payments to his dope dealers.

I'd love nothing more than to see that pompous blowhard get taken down a peg or two.

Missed two, figured the long rant about Bolsheviks was Hitler, didn't seem Ann's style to be so formal. The other was I thought the one mentioning America being destroyed by liberals was Ann, didn't realize Hitler was concerned about us:-)

Yeah me too - explains my 12 score, but they must have replaced Germany with America because then it would have been too easy I guess.

I wonder how much Hitler really cared about the US. They must have thought the "America First" crowd with Lindbergh and company would be influential enough. I'm really curious about how much Hitler really talked about the US.

No, I haven't read it, but it sounds interesting. Certainly, feminism was not exactly significant in Weimar and the Third Reich.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Could it be about making money.  That's what I think about Annthrax - maybe I'm naive, but the stuff she says is so out-on-a-limb that I can only imagine the motive is in the paycheck.  The more outrageous she becomes, the more money she makes.

And there doesn't seem to be a counterpart on the left, M. Moore notwithstanding.   Why?  I think it's because there's no counterpart in a leftish audience.

Neoboho

I only missed three - but then I haven't read a lot of Hitler since the 1970's, so that's still a pretty good score. And I haven't read ANY Coulter.

Back in the Sixties when I was an Ayn Rand Libertarian, I got interested in Hitler due to his enormous success at running a political party. Mein Kampf is STILL one of the best textbooks for running a political movement ever written. The Republicans are certainly running it as their playbook, and the Democrats could stand to reread it.

I then found a lot of other correspondences between his life and mine. Unlike a lot of people, I recognized Hitler as NOT an "alpha male" with the ability to control other people by the usual alpha male means, but as an "outsider" - an "omega" in behavioral terminology - who managed to develop the ability to control people via oration.

It is even easy to pinpoint exactly where in his life his personality changed - it was immediately after the death of his brother. Like most humans, he confronted death early and was unable to deal with it rationally. He did reject mankind as imperfect - which is a Transhuman response - but he was so inculcated with the Germanic state culture that he fixated on the state - and control of the state by an individual - as the means of changing the world. His racial attitudes were based on the recognition that humans needed to be improved, but unfortunately society did not have the knowledge then that we have now about how this could be done without genocide and clumsy "breeding" methods.

And of course his anti-Semitism was absorbed from his society, just as being anti-black is absorbed from ours. He once told an associate that he KNEW Jews were not the sole evil in society, but he needed a specific target to focus on as the source of society's problems - and the Jews were historically it in Catholic Germany. He was undoubtedly anti-Semitic by nature as well, but it was also a calculated position with him.

In any event, comparing Hitler, who was really quite an intelligent individual with a considerable body of reading under his belt and a considerable imagination, to a lame like Coulter is really insulting - to Hitler.

I mentioned that before - she really doesn't do anything that O'Reilly and that lot don't do, but she does it as a FEMALE - which makes her more interesting to the observer, apparently. She has the aggressiveness of a crack whore.

I call her the Paris Hilton of Republicans - except she isn't as hot - and possibly not even as intelligent - as Paris (depending on whether you think Paris really is a dumb bimbo or that it's all an act). Her job is the same, though - to get noticed. Period.

I got 12, just from having read Mein Kampf many years ago.

I also missed two because I didn't recall Hitler having much at all to say about America.

I don't think 'America' was substituted for 'Germany'. That would have been cheating. I think they searched a database of Hitler quotes. Someone who talked as much as Hitler did will mention almost anything a few times.

Wherever Mike Godwin may be tonight, his brain is probably spinning.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

BTW, Besides claiming that her NYC address was "classified", she recently made a caustic remark about what liberals would do if they had her address. Of course, her adoring fans would never bother her at her home address.

If I was really mean-spirited, I would list the names and addresses of all her neighbors in her buildng and we could all write letters to them.

A not-so-subtle warning, AHC: One more nasty crack about the 9/11 widows and you're fair game.

OMG, BevD: Joe Pyne! The urvater of the right-wing TV talking-head!

That takes me back a ways: I grew up in LA, and I remember lying in bed watching his show (it aired at midnight), and even then, I recall being enthralled by his mastery of the political-commentary-as-entertainment shtick (right-wing crank division, of course) - and especially the way he would have audience members step up into his "beef box" to comment: then mock them if they didn't agree with him, and tell them to "take a hike" when their time was up. Ahh, the Golden Age of Television!

I wonder what old Joe would have made of Ann Coulter: personally, I think Pyne would have ripped her head off and kicked it back to her (with his good leg: he did lose one: at Iwo Jima, IIRC). Ideology aside, Joe Pyne was a resolutely old-school working-class character: "Blond Lightning" would have probably reminded him too much of all those girls who told him to "take a hike" back in high school!

You just made my morning - $1.5 million for a moldy condo! I bet she really got taken for a ride in Palm Beach.

You know, of course, my "threat" was a takeoff on the recent rash of right wing threats made to liberals in which the wingers point out they are the ones with the guns. The right wing better watch out for me because I'm the one with access to Lexis-Nexis and I know how to use it!

Ann Coulter, of all people, understands how this works. In her vew, strippers bring on their own troubles by being strippers.

There's a lot to be said for being a retarded liberal moral degenerate who doesn't know right from wrong and can't talk without drooling. You get to have lots of fun and no one can hold you responsible for doing stupid or annoying things - you're just being yourself!

I must confess that I am one of those people who likes good fruitcake -- the pastry kind. A friend makes huge batches with a family recipe, in an enormous mixing bowl reserved for the holiday fruitcakes, and then soaks the loaves in a very liberal quantity of Myers dark rum. Yum.

It is the conventional wisdom, however, that there is a continuing recycling of commercial fruitcakes given as holiday gifts. One fruitcake, allegedly baked in 1946, is still being mailed to the next unsuspecting gift recipient.

The qualities of commercial fruitcakes, sadly, transfer only in badly mutated form to government. One excellent history of internal decisionmaking during Viet Nam is HR McMaster's Dereliction of Duty. McMaster, an active duty Army colonel with a PhD in history and a distinguished combat record, is especially concerned with the role of senior military officers in the decisionmaking, in being excluded from decisionmaking, and as part of political coverups.

Reminiscent of the questionable WMD and terror intelligence about Iraq is the newly declassified NSA documents about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Given that JFK and LBJ were not Republicans, the problem of executive-branch driven wars, never really studied before Congressional authorization, is a bipartisan one. In fairness, I suppose, the Viet Nam war was a result of a series of policy errors from 1945 on, in Democratic and Republican administrations. The involvement was even less planned than Iraq.

I believe that a key issue in the 2006 congressional elections should be getting candidates and incumbents to take clear positions on the role of Congress in its Constitutional duty to make war. Yes, I understand that there can be immediate situations, nuclear threats being the greatest, when it is impractical to bring the matter before Congress before instant action has to be taken.

Afghanistan, after 9/11, may well have qualified as an immediate need, although there was no reason Congress should not stay informed. White House planning for Iraq had been evolving for some tinme, and there was adequate time to bring it before appropriate committees, in executive session. Just as I want to see discipline in the White House consulting Congress, I also want to see real enforcement of leaks that happen during a legitimate period of consultation.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Yes, it's a very fascinating & fruitful comparison to think about.

Just one of the things BevD's bringing it up called to mind for me was the Morton Downey Jr. TV show in the 80's. Now he did a bit of vilifying & humiliating the guests (which Bill O'Reilly does in a different way,) but I think his main shtick really was inflaming the studio audience and the viewing audience via osmosis from that. That really was like Hitler, straight out of Simon LeBon's The Crowd. (In fact, one strong memory of mine was when a German client of mine, now deceased, he was a kid at the end of WWII, said to me one evening during one of his annual trips to NY when I met him in front of his hotel: "I just saw the most amazing TV show" with his mouth agape, like he was in shock. He was talking about the Morton Downey show, and I believe it was a particularly rowdy one.)

In a way I think Coulter, instead of riling up a fan base to riotous action, mainly sells the outrage from her opposition (& sneers from the "elite liberal MSM," as evidenced in the article I linked to in a a comment below, i.e., the Today Show types.) Her fan base appears to like that she says things that rile liberals? Can anyone think of anything else she sells except vilifying an old Reagan-era narrative of what liberals are? Over and over and over? She's a one-trick pony, and it sells. That's similar to Joe Pyne's anti-hippie shtick. Even with the Clinton/Monica thing, I remember other conservative commentators trying to make a more serious case about perjury and things like intimidation & manipulation of witnesses or info., while The Coulter often simplified the debate into baser "moral values" issues, i.e., "good people/bad people." Of course she knows better about making everything "black & white," she did go to law school, she's doing that on purpose.

In the end, I really come back to wondering why she still can gather enough audience to make a best seller. Remember Nixon's line about "you won't have me to kick around any longer?" Well, with the GOP in control of 3 branches of government, why is it still selling to bash "liberals"? The same old, same old, nearly 20 years old shtick? I can't think of any other reason except that she manages to get a defensive rise out of liberals by upping the outrageousness each time; people are attracted to the insult factor (almost related to the appeal of a guy like Don Rickles;) otherwise, she'd have been dumped as tiresome long ago. It's puzzling.

Ann Coulter asked "you" to cut her lawn? Instead of saying no, you say "Die Bitch" I wonder were she gets her material?

Now who's being a bitch?

Actually, in a thinking democracy, no one is fair game for simple-minded smackdown. The Anti-Federalist Papers are the Lincoln-Douglas debates are examples of what should be.

We've gone downhill from the Romans. Were Coulter in the Coliseum, she'd at least give out Italian bread.

Reading all her books...well, I did have a job during Viet Nam, having to read the translated North Vietnamese Communist Party newspaper, Nhan Dan, in support of Army special operations. I've attended autopsies. I was born in Newark. About the worst thing I can remember is smelling a culture of gas gangrene. Still, I hesitate to read either Coulter or Streicher. There is a question of taste.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

or Mad Magazine. She's like some genetic mixture brewed by Scott Adams, Hugh Hefner, and Gahan Wilson. I think Leni Riefenstahl had better taste.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Speaking for myself, I only began to read Mein Kampf when Republican newsgroup users began claiming that Hitler was a socialist.

Neoboho

Hold on to that thought: Hitler was an outsider.  I think it has some merit.

If you have more energy that I do right now, you might enjoy running that by a Georges Battaille essay that's available on-line: The Psychological Structure of Fascism. 

It's been a few years since I read it, but I was particularly intrigued by Battaille's treatment of the heterogenous and homogenous elements of fascist society.   

Neoboho

Ah, the key giveaway on that one was talking about the Bolsheviks' thoughts about sex, something that Hitler wouldn't have bothered with, but which is very important to our current crop of rightwingers.

I haven't read that piece by Battaille but I've read one of his books and some other stuff. Interesting viewpoints, especially on sexual morals and transgression.

Heh - try being an anarchist - you can have even more fun!

I won't even mention what a Transhuman might do.

If I ever get a laptop with wireless, she might find out what a hacker can do, too. Paris Hilton will think she had it good.

In the department of good intentions, Ann and Adolf are like marriage made in heaven. In the department of intelectual abilities, count your blessing. The last time I checked, columns of Coulter-Youths were not marching through our cities.

By the way, was anyone surprised, like I was, with the length and vehemence of her diatribes against "Darwiniacs"?

LOL, SFC Wallace. I have lots of material for Ann Coulter. See my post, "A Modest Proposal For The Terrorists" wherein I recommend to the terrorists that they kill people like Ann Coulter who actually hate Muslims and leave the rest of us alone.

"Death to Ann Coulter! Calling all terrorists!"

Leave me out of your unity crap. I thought George W. Bush was an asshole the day before 9/11 and I was certain he was an asshole the day after 9/11.

The weasel had to be dragged to NYC, he was so scared that NYers blamed him for 9/11. Go back and look at the tapes on 9/14/01. Before he lucked out with the fireman from Baldwin, Bush looked like he would start blubbering if anyone looked at him crosseyed.

The lazy S.O.B. held the 9/11 memorial on a Friday instead of a Saturday when everyone could have watched with their families because George W. Bush does not work weekends even if 3,000 of his fellow Americans are lying dead, buried under a pile of rubble.

Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings - Saturday. Clinton impeachment hearing - Saturday. Princess Di funeral - Saturday.

Everyone knows that if you want to reach the broadest audience, you hold the event on a Saturday. Bush didn't give a shit if anyone watched the 9/11 memorial. He just wanted to get the damned thing over with.

I'd start with "Slander" it lays the foundation for the way she uses absurdity to prove a point. You'll better understand her articles and other books, and not just take what you hear on the Keith Overman show and believe that's actually what she said.
Having never met you I have no idea if you are either retarded, a moral degenerate or a cowardly traitor. However, if you are any of those I wouldn't think it would be because you are a liberal. I would be more inclined to believe that your liberal philosiphy would have grown out of the underlying condition ie. Retarded, moral degenerate...
As for why I waste my time, this is a kind of therapy for me. I'm from San Francisco, most of my family is still there and completely infected with the "Democratic Flu." So I used to sit around and have these discussions with them. Now that I'm in Georgia it's kind of hard to find a Democrat let alone a liberal to bat ideas around with. So I come here, it's usually pretty fun.

Once again I'm amazed by the depth of your knowledge and political analysis. Keep up the good work.

While lower life forms do fit Coulter, I flashed back to the days when I took care of snakes, and thought of the Smooth Green Snake. Yahooligans' description of its behavior, in a weird way, fits Coulter: "This snake, active during the day, is a capable climber but spends more time on the ground. Its color provides excellent camouflage as it moves through grass and low shrubs in search of insects and spiders."

Not mentioned here is the Smooth Green Snake's defense mechanism, of thrashing about in simulated convulsions when exposed. Mind you, this was supposed to be scary, but it was easy enough to pick up the snake. Thrashing in all directions seems to be characteristic of the Smooth Blonde Snake.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

It was in one of David Weber's "Honor Harrington" science fiction novels, IIRC, where the strong female protagonist observed to a villain: "I hope, some day, to meet you on a field of honor. Assuming, of course, that you have any."

Coulter is a true disciple of Joe McCarthy. We need to update the classic challenge to "Let us not assassinate this topic further, Miss Coulter. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency madam, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

LOL - Transhuman, you could become an overnight sensation if you chopped her head off on videotape.

You'd get millions of people to re-think their opinion about the futility of terrorist attacks.

On second thought, chopping her famous legs off one at time would have more entertainment value.

I'll throw a couple of bucks into the pool.

"Which brings me to this week's scandal about No Such Agency spying on "Americans." I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo." - Ann Coulter, December 2005

Ann Coulter advocates sending me to a Cuban concentration camp and she is backed by a right-wing fanatical billionaire who financed an attempt to overthrow a legitimately elected president. She's not just shooting her big, fat, mouth off to sell books. She always, always insists that she means what she says.

If the c**t thinks I am going to the ovens quietly, she's got another thing coming. I've read my Nazi history and I'm not a docile Jew.

Death to Ann Coulter!

Thanks, I will.

Got it in one, aa: I have long thought that Ann Coulter should better be thought of (when having to think of her at all) as a sort of entertainer (insult-comedian variety) rather than as a "political" commentator: even by today's debased standards of punditry, A.C.'s sneery liberal-bashing shtick is pretty lame: seen as a type of "lounge act", though: it makes a good deal more sense: crappy stand-up clubs throughout the land are full of bad, self-important "comediennes" like her: I guess the real joke is that Ann Coulter gets taken seriously.

Probably no more than Dan Rather and CBS news did on behalf of the Kerry campaign.

Oops! Change "Brian Williams" to "Brian Ross". Ross, from what I read, is supposed to be a decent investigative reporter. Maybe he was so ashamed of his Johnelle Bryant interview, he convinced ABC News to delete it from the archives. If so, Mr. Ross has an obligatin to the American public to dislcose what else he knew about Johnelle Bryant at the time of the interview.

Sniff, sniff - if you had read this week's Weekly World News, you would know that President Bush wanted to be on an episode of 24 but Rove put the kibosh on it because Bush's constituents would get too confused. If you were a regular reader, you would also know that the real source of tension between the US and France is that the Louisiana Purchase was really a rental and France wants it back.

Johnelle Bryant was a federal employee. After 9/11, she claimed that she recognized Mohammed Atta when she saw him on tv. Brian Ross never asked what she did after she recognized him.

Did Johnelle Bryant tell her boss about Atta and then he called the FBI or did she call the FBI herself? Her story must have caused a brouhaha at the Florida City Farm Agency where she was a supervisor. The FBI must have questioned Ms. Bryant's co-workers as well as Bryant. A report on the 9/11 hijackers in Florida City would have been a big deal in that neck of the woods.

Eight months after she would have told the FBI about her story, ABC News was the first news outlet to carry it. Not the Miami Herald, not a local affiliate of a major network. Brian Ross did not mention the FBI's opinion of Bryant's story nor did he interview her co-workers or even ask Bryant about their reactions.

Then the story sank like a stone and now, ABC News has deleted all references to Johnelle Bryant from its archives. Neither NBC or CBS carried the story.

Johnelle Bryant was quite specific as to what Mohammed Atta said to her - "And I was taking notes. We typically take notes of what's considered an initial applicant interview. And while taking notes, I wrote his name down. And I spelled it A-T-T-A-H and he told me, "No, A-T-T-A, as in 'Atta boy!"

If I was Brian Ross, I would have raised my eyebrow at that one. The 9/11 Commission Report stated that Atta only learned German in 1992 but the commission never said when or where Atta learned English. Was his grasp of English so good that Atta could handle an American colloquialism like "Atta boy" and make a play on words?

Bryant supposedly met the Atta and the other hijackers twice. Ross never asked her about the other hijackers and, again, never asked her about her ordeal after she recognized Atta.

The only people in the media who made much of Johnelle Bryant's story were some conservative pundits who pointed out that Bryant's reluctance to question Atta's motives was an example of the idiocy of multi-culturalism and political correctness. In fact, a British conservative columnist, Mark Steyn, made hay out of Johnelle Bryant's story last year in a couple of his columns.

ABC is owned by Disney, which as a corporation, is to the right. Zenia Mucha, Dragon Lady, is Disney's executive vice-president of corporate communications. For years, Mucha was Al D'Amato's Karl Rove and in fact, was with him during the period that Senator Al tried to smear Clinton. I'm sure Zenia Mucha would have no problem telling lies on behalf of the Bush administration.

What I suspect is that Johnelle Bryant may have thought she met Atta and then her story was blown up the Bush administration into a complete fabrication. I read a news story about her the other day that claimed Johnelle Bryant left the USDA for medical reasons either last year or the year before. Psychiatric problems?

What I meant about Brian Ross was that, if Ross knew that the Johnelle Bryant interview was set up by the Bush administration as a propaganda piece, he should tell the American public about it now.

The Bush administration had no business then or any other time, for the matter, deliberately scaring Americans by telling big, fat lies about terrorists and especially ones about the biggest terrorist investigation in US history. Bryant's story was major evidence in the case if it was true.

Time for a respectable investigative reporter to follow up on the Johnelle Bryant interview.