Dobson's World: Mad Annie Coulter's neighborhood

David Neiwert, one of our best contemporary writers on rightwing extremism, has some worthwhile comments on Swimming in Coulter's cesspool 02/19/06 at his Orcinus blog:

There seems to have been a realization on the right - long, long overdue - that Coulter had gone too far. Sure, she can wish aloud for Tim McVeigh to blow up the New York Times Building all she wants, but even they could see that using an ethnic slur was beyond the realm of acceptable discourse.

But it wasn't so much the slur itself, as how it might reflect badly on the rest of the conservative movement. (I think everyone's favorite remark on the right was that "she isn't helping anyone.") After all, reassuring all those middle-class voters that they aren't the Party of Bigots has been an important talking point for them in recent years.

The occasion of this rightwing grumbling about Mad Annie was her appearance before the good Republican white folks at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) national conference a few days ago, in which she said, "I think our motto should be, post-9-11: 'Raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences'."

With a prominent Republican ideologue like Mad Annie talking like that in public, it makes it harder to reassure nice suburban voters who may think that the Christian Republican White Peoples Party is more like to protect them from The Terrorists but who don't like to think of themselves as racial bigots.