Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Hitler vs Coulter Quiz

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Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media.(static)

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Hitler vs Coulter Quiz

Category: Politics
Posted on: June 22, 2006 9:55 AM, by Ed Brayton

Did Adolf Hitler say it, or did Ann Coulter say it? How many can you get right? I got 9 out of 14 right.

Comments

I got a 10!

Mainly though it was because frankly, Hitler writes better.

Posted by: Dave S. | June 22, 2006 10:12 AM

Wow! That was harder than the Multistate Bar Exam. 10 out of 14.

Posted by: Dan | June 22, 2006 10:17 AM

I got a 10 too, largely (as Dave S. said) by the way the sentences were structured and a few by historical references that postdate Hitler.

Scary how close they all are though.

Posted by: Jeff Hebert | June 22, 2006 10:19 AM

13. I wrongly attributed one to Hitler.

Posted by: Jeff Chamberlain | June 22, 2006 10:25 AM

I got 12 of a possible 14. I made exactly the same observation as Dave when we were discussing this at TheologyWeb. Hitler writes better.

Posted by: Sylas | June 22, 2006 10:27 AM

Liberal conspiracy! I only got 6 right! I thought they were all Hitler.

Posted by: J-Dog | June 22, 2006 10:30 AM

10. As if it's meaningful to distinguish between the two for most purposes.

However, Hitler's quotes were changed for this test, substituting some of Hitler's pro-Aryan and anti-Semitic language with the words, "America", "Democrat", "liberal", and "the liberal media" to make the Coulter quotes a little more difficult to spot.

Discussed on FreeRepublic back in March.

Posted by: Ted | June 22, 2006 10:48 AM

Ted -

It did strike me as a bit odd that Hitler apparently used so many Americanisms. Especially the word "liberal", which outside the U.S. is a fairly innocuous political descriptor and not a synonym for "cocksucker".

Posted by: Dave S. | June 22, 2006 10:54 AM

Sylas says:

I got 12 of a possible 14. I made exactly the same observation as Dave when we were discussing this at TheologyWeb. Hitler writes better.

Better, but still god-awful. And Hitler had help, at least as far as his unreadably ponderous epic Mein Kampf goes.

Posted by: Dave S. | June 22, 2006 11:01 AM

I got 10 because I didn't realise that Hitler would complain about "Liberals" attacking America. Otherwise I may have got 11, but that test was really hard actually.

They are quite difficult to tell apart and that really scares me.

Posted by: J O'Donnell | June 22, 2006 11:16 AM

I got 10, but as was mentioned above, it was becuase Hitler writes better.

Posted by: Mike Cornwell | June 22, 2006 11:27 AM

13 out of 14! But I think it says something that Hitler had a far better command of prose than Coulter ever will.

Posted by: ThomasHobbes934 | June 22, 2006 12:00 PM

12/14. I agree that Hitler is stylistically superior to Coulter. One of the two that I missed is perplexing to me:

1) "Hence it is that at the..."
=this is in talking about liberals in America causing destruction in America, as if it's a bad thing, which doesn't seem something Hitler would've been troubled with???

Oh well.

Posted by: sdanielmorgan | June 22, 2006 12:06 PM

I also got ten - but nit because Hitler wrote better, it was because Hitler had better writers to do it for him. Though as Dave wrote it is still bad writing. Though to credit Hitlers speech writers it was probably quite motivational, in a sick and twisted fashion, with ol' Hitler up there in front of thousands whohave been marching through the streets with torches. Then their "great leader" gets up and spews that rubbish, a lot of "power" words in his quotes.

Posted by: Treban | June 22, 2006 12:07 PM

13 out of 14 correct. Though it didn't take me long to figure out they had substited "liberal" for "Jew" in Hitler's quotes. It was fairly easy because, Hitler's word usage and sentence construction are a little archaic. But the test served its purpose. The content and the totalitarian intent behind the content are identical.

Posted by: Susan Brassfield Cogan | June 22, 2006 1:11 PM

I got a 12 out of 14. Primarily because, like Susan Brassfield Cogan says above, that Hitler's style is more archaic, wheras Mr. Coulter writes with all the intellectual force of a 15 year old American boy.

Posted by: Leni | June 22, 2006 1:47 PM

12 out of 14. I agree that Hitler's archaic style was a pretty good clue. I continue to be amazed that people in this country actually think Coulter contributes to the cause of freedom and defends founding American ideals, mind-boggling.

Posted by: Mike Heath | June 22, 2006 3:06 PM

The problem is that Hitler didn't say those specific things and that's a pretty big detail.

So comparing Coulter to Imaginary-Hitler is a bit disingenuous; sure, it's fun, but fundamentally not much different from the right-wingers that put words into other's mouths in order to make them sound silly or stupid for the amusement of their echo chamber. On any given day read StopTheACLU or FreeRepublic and you see this type of thing.

I don't think inventing things to compare Coulter is necessary. Her body of work and brand of fascism stands on its own.

Posted by: Ted | June 22, 2006 3:57 PM

11.

But wait a minute! Didn't foremost political authority Mr. Gribbit say just a few days ago that Hitler and the Nazis were leftists?

Posted by: Capt. Rational | June 22, 2006 4:27 PM

I got a 12 out of 14. Primarily because, like Susan Brassfield Cogan says above, that Hitler's style is more archaic, wheras Mr. Coulter writes with all the intellectual force of a 15 year old American boy.

12 for me too, and for exactly the same reason.

Posted by: WJD | June 22, 2006 5:42 PM

I took this a couple of weeks ago using the stylistic criterion, and did 13 out of 14.

Posted by: Pieter B | June 22, 2006 6:12 PM

Perhaps it's time to invoke Godwin's Law? Ah heck, I couldn't resist. I got 11 of them right.

Posted by: Jim Babka | June 23, 2006 1:49 AM

For the fun of it, I put Coulter for all of them. All of the sudden my phone rang. It was a pre-recorded message from Bill O'Reilly, apparently Fox Security will be visiting me to discuss my "recent actions?"

Posted by: dogmeatIB | June 23, 2006 2:33 AM

14 of 14,

But I realized that all of the older quotes used "liberal" (and I think a single case of the possesive plural, "liberal's"), while the newer quotes always referred to "liberals".

The older quotes used 'liberal' as a description of a class of people, the newer quotes used 'liberals' as a class of people needing no description.

Cheers,

-Flex

Posted by: Flex | June 23, 2006 8:31 AM

11 out of 14 correct (I might've done better, but it was hard to click and goose-step at the same time).

Nifty experiment: have Coulter back on Leno live to take this test. I'd like to see if she's able to identify the garbage she allegedly creates.

Posted by: tminuspi | June 26, 2006 9:49 AM

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