But I see you still posted your attack piece though. So typical.

You must remember that in the nineteenth century the parties were reversed and the same is true up into the twentieth century. Republicans were like the Democrats of today and vice versa (Well, I take that back, they weren’t precisely like the Democrats of today, but you get my meaning).

It seems like the ideals, by the time FDR was President, started to become interwoven, and by the 1960’s the parties started to really switch. The Dems were still holding on to that old routine, but by the seventies they were on the other side. The Republicans had now changed their tune to old ways of the Democrats. The Warren Court proves this. Heck, Kennedy and LBJ in the sixties proves the beginnings of the paradigm shift.

Another example, if you want to go back further in time *is* Licoln to which Jamie alluded when he brought up Booth. Licoln as we all know was a Republican, but he certainly did not have the ideals that we would consider to be Republican today.

So we can see how the ideals of the Progressive mind has done a complete 180 over the course of 110-120 years.

Now, I’m going to confess to you that I don’t remember from my law studies the impetus behind these changes. I have a BA in Religious Studies, and I thought about getting a second degree in law so that I could go into Civil Rights law. However…

If I’ve missed the boat on this, somebody please help me out, but I think I remember this from all those years ago.

Coulter’s commentary is inane but your Booth narrative is problematic because its ahisorical. The elephant in the room being ignored is the democratic party’s relationship to “people who have formed lynch mobs, bombed churches, assassinated civil rights leaders, murdered abortion doctors, and bombed office buildings” from reconstruction to the civil rights era.

During that time period the people you label “right-wingers” were actually deeply entwined with the otherwise more progressive party: the democrats…indeed the south was virtually monolithically democratic.

That’s because the democrats created the KKK in order to terrorize blacks and republicans. As leftist Columbia University historian Eric Foner states, they were “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease’s described them as a “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” the democrats wanted to expand slavery, including it in their platform 6 times, while the republicans wanted to end it. They created jim crow laws and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. I could go on.

This racism was deeply entwined with progressive politics. For instance, labor and child welfare laws, Social Security and FDR’s New Deal were created as the result of a “gentleman’s agreement within the Democratic party” (as Tsahai Tafari puts it) to ignore segregation and the lynching. This is why Westminster College historian David W. Southern writes in “The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917″ — that racism “went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” “The ideas of race and color were powerful, controlling elements in progressive social and political thinking… and this fixation on race explains how democratic reform and racism went hand-in-hand.” Indeed, the review of Southern’s book on amazon summerizes: “most northern progressives were either indifferent to the fate of southern blacks or actively supported the social system.”

In is this context to which I assume Coulter is referring. Her “analysis” is no doubt unfair, as its unclear to what extent if any Booth himself was aligned with the democratic party or progressive politics, but its no more unfair than your decontextualization.

Fact checking an SNL skit by CNN–PERFECT!

The whole thing is so completely absurd it is not really worth your time to debunk it. In 1976 Gerald Ford told an audience that all of the wars of the 20th century (up until that point anyway) were started by Democrats. He was right, at least in terms of major wars, consider Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy/Johnson. So what does that mean, that Democrats are all war-mongers and Republicans pacifists. Hardly. Let us even suppose that Ms. Coulter’s “facts” are correct, what does that mean? That if Mr. Obama would be assassinated, it would be by a liberal? Or perhaps right-wingers lack the skills and intelligence and thus are incapable of plotting an assassination? Maybe they are just too nice.

I am sure that there are now 10 times more people who are even aware that Ms. Coulter was even on The Joy Behar Show than than before (I had never even heard of the show).