Ann Coulter's new book “Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.”

[trish]

we're waiting for the lazy, yet inevitable cry of racism....that usually takes the place of a pragmatic retort.

wtf??

[Prospero]

I feel a deep heave of nausea when Ms Coulter's name is mentioned. She is a noble heir to Herr Goebbels.

[robertlouis]

I feel a deep heave of nausea when Ms Coulter's name is mentioned. She is a noble heir to Herr Goebbels.

And she always seems to be full of hate and desperate to spit it out. She's certainly articulate, but I genuinely worry about the well-being of people who have such a one-sided view of the world. (Yes, I'm all heart; it's a liberal trait. )

Over here we have Peter Hitchens (brother of the better-known Christopher), but he isn't in the same ballpark as Anne Coulter.

[russtafa]

Wow it's so funny listening to this ,especially Trish's come backs

[Prospero]

I think in the UK - by and large - we just laugh at people like Coulter and Glen Beck. They get no real traction. Look at what a clown Oswald Mosley was seen to be compared to his european counterparts.

[SkankyTrannyAnna]

This is the biggest fail of an argument ever. As if the right wing aren't a 1000 times more guilty of the things she is accusing the left of.

simplistic, extreme black-and-white thinking, - either with us or against us. remember that one?
fear of novelty, - shitting bricks over changing energy use, shitting bricks over rise of developing world ecconomis, shitting bricks over pretty much anything, they are one ones called conservatives after all.
inability to follow logical arguments, - demanding deficit reduction, then demanding tax cuts.
acceptance of contradictory ideas, - saying they want individual freedom but also they want to bann gay marriage, keep weed illegal,
being transfixed by images, - bible thumping flag-wavers say other are transfixed by images...
a religious worship of their leaders, - literally. they are the ones standing up at the front of crazy mega churches, and look at the palin worshipper, look at rush limbaugh and his 'dittoheads'
and a blind hatred of their opponents. - from the woman who came on TV shouting that John Edwards was a faggot...

[Prospero]

Eloquent .... you got em in your sights Anna x

This is the biggest fail of an argument ever. As if the right wing aren't a 1000 times more guilty of the things she is accusing the left of.

simplistic, extreme black-and-white thinking, - either with us or against us. remember that one?
fear of novelty, - shitting bricks over changing energy use, shitting bricks over rise of developing world ecconomis, shitting bricks over pretty much anything, they are one ones called conservatives after all.
inability to follow logical arguments, - demanding deficit reduction, then demanding tax cuts.
acceptance of contradictory ideas, - saying they want individual freedom but also they want to bann gay marriage, keep weed illegal,
being transfixed by images, - bible thumping flag-wavers say other are transfixed by images...
a religious worship of their leaders, - literally. they are the ones standing up at the front of crazy mega churches, and look at the palin worshipper, look at rush limbaugh and his 'dittoheads'
and a blind hatred of their opponents. - from the woman who came on TV shouting that John Edwards was a faggot...

[trish]

This is the biggest fail of an argument ever. As if the right wing aren't a 1000 times more guilty of the things she is accusing the left of.

simplistic, extreme black-and-white thinking, - either with us or against us. remember that one?
fear of novelty, - shitting bricks over changing energy use, shitting bricks over rise of developing world ecconomis, shitting bricks over pretty much anything, they are one ones called conservatives after all.
inability to follow logical arguments, - demanding deficit reduction, then demanding tax cuts.
acceptance of contradictory ideas, - saying they want individual freedom but also they want to bann gay marriage, keep weed illegal,
being transfixed by images, - bible thumping flag-wavers say other are transfixed by images...
a religious worship of their leaders, - literally. they are the ones standing up at the front of crazy mega churches, and look at the palin worshipper, look at rush limbaugh and his 'dittoheads'
and a blind hatred of their opponents. - from the woman who came on TV shouting that John Edwards was a faggot...

Bravo, bravo

[robertlouis]

Anne Coulter is the most articulate exponent of this generation's extreme mouthpieces of right-wing hate and fear.

She's maintaining the tradition of strategic paranoia that started with Nixon in the 70s and has been a mainstay of Republican politics ever since. What he laid down means that there is little chance of genuine bi-partisanship in US politics for generations to come.

[Stavros]

Ann Coulter cites Gustave Le Bon's Psychologie des Foules as a guide to 'mobs' or 'crowds' but has failed to note the key point in Le Bon's work: the people in question are 'in a moment', that is, congregating outside a town hall, army barracks, war memorial or whatever public space it is: Coulter is taking a neutral word 'crowd', mixing it with a pejorative one 'mob', and taking them out of a precise moment and replacing them as a solid block of people with shared opinions: more a segment of society or sector or society than the Foules Le Bon was talking about. One of the curiosities of real crowds is that they can be made up of diverse opinion: a crowd of people attending a rally outside the Lincoln Memorial or in Trafalgar Square may contain all sorts of policial views: a Mob, by contrast, will often be like-minded people whose aim is some form of disturbance of the peace, which is why the word 'mob' is pejorative. There is no evidence that Hitler read Le Bon, but as Ian Kershaw notes in his recent biography, Hitler did read a JR Rossbach, a Munich-based neurologist who summarised Le Bon's work in a book on the psychology of the masses. None of this is relevant to the divisions between left and right, but Coulter, whoever she is, would not want to propose diversity of thought within political spectra let alone what she imagines to be 'the left' -after all there are Americans who think Barack Obama is a 'Socialist', and I once met a woman who stated with iron conviction that FD Roosevelt was a 'Communist'....