Thirteen for Fourteen

Like Matt Yglesias, I know my Hitler well. I've read about as much of Mein Kampf as a sane man could bear. (Hitler was not just a moral sewer; he was a lousy writer.) I've also read or seen a large sample of his speeches and other documents, and even perused, with great interest, the psychological profile of Hitler the OSS put together in the forties.

So I actually found it pretty easy to distinguish Ann Coulter from Adolf Hitler. (Take the quiz before you read on.) For one, A.H. seldom referred to Democrats in the sense of the U.S. Democratic Party. To him the word "Democrat" would have meant either someone who believes in democracy as a form of government, or a Social Democrat, the major left wing party in Germany; Hitler hated both. (As Yglesias points out, there's also a semantic difference between Coulter and Hitler in the meaning of "bourgeois")

For another, repellent as Ann Coulter is, her prose style is considerably sharper and more succinct than Hitler's. Hitler, who dictated most of his prose work to a secretary, favored long, rambling sentences and lists. Consider the original title of Mein Kampf. It was, in English, "Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice." (Hitler's editors were able to talk him out of that title, but they could only do so much with the rest of the book.) Coulter, as Ygelsias points out, works in the sound bite era of cable TV, and her prose fits it. The only way the quiz was able to make her quotes look as long as Hitler's was to use a lot of elipses.

So yeah, Ann Coulter's a noxious creature, but I can tell her apart from Hitler. Who she'll brag to about that, I don't want to know.