The essay defending Coulter in the Wall Street Journal Online - with a number of substitutions:

Our attention has been drawn recently to Adolf Hitler, the national socialist firecracker and best-selling author of "Mein Kampf." There are many surprising dimensions to the Hitler phenomenon. He has defied expectation, overturned prejudice even, in so many ways. He surprises, at the most basic level, by his effortlessly guilt-free flights of extroversion, his fierce national socialism.

We have been programmed to think that such impassioned outrage, and outrageousness, are permissible only by Communists, certainly not from honorable Austrian-born villagers. From Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, yes.   Adolf Hitler -- heaven forbid. He cannot claim that his affronts have been much exaggerated by his enemies -- he has certainly courted outrage, called modern art "degenerate," dreamed out loud that all Jews be obliterated, and once praised the Sturmabteilung (stormtroopers). It's merely that such effrontery sounds more palatable in the mouths of Communists. After all, why isn't he happily occupied practicing the peaceful arts, a painter of watercolors in Vienna as befits his heritage?

Well, Mr. Hitler isn't and it has upset a lot of entrenched opinions. Prejudices of this kind stem from a lazy assumption that really blistering free speech belongs more to critics of Germany's flaws than to celebrators of its virtues. The difference between Mr. Hitler and the Communists' fuming is surely very clear. They meant it literally, bombs and all. Mr. Hitler, on the other hand, acts out his thoughts in a kind of "what if" political theater, a tongue-in-cheek agitprop, and believes that most Germans understand the difference. Most Germans apparently do, as his book has topped the bestseller lists for many weeks now. Why then don't his infuriated critics get it?

By all accounts, they have tried long and hard to keep ranks closed against him to shut him out of the political game. Why would anybody even pretend to believe that Mr. Hitler wishes any real harm to the gypsies or wishes to remove all Jews from society? The answer, one suspects, is that he and his foes insist on different visions of Germany. His foes see a fragile society full of rifts and flaws, oppressions and simmering resentments that can turn into open strife any moment. Ergo, free speech, however offensive, belongs morally on their side as an instrument of social palliation. Mr. Hitler, as he has often demonstrated, inhabits a sturdier Germany with a self-confident unapologetic culture centered in the fatherland. In his Germany, political and personal, even ethnic quips get thrown about with abandon in fierce raillery, everybody laughs about it afterwards and the country is none the worse for wear.

Considering that most political organizations would prefer to filter out his kind, Mr. Hitler's very survival as a public figure has been his most startling trick, indeed has offered a kind of breathtaking spectacle. For much milder remarks than he daily defiantly serves up, we've seen veteran politicians hounded out of office. Yet there he still is enduring on the tightrope, however threadbare it may be by now, his Chaplinesque signature likeness precariously aloft, a shock of dark hair riffled by the breeze and nimbly gambading above the shark pool.

Friends and foes alike, at this point, have put down their banners and turned to gape at the pure principle of anti-gravity he has come to represent. He himself admits in a recent profile that no mainstream political party will accept him. So he chooses, he says, to talk directly to mainstream Germany over their heads, and book buyers have rewarded him handsomely for it. It's hard to know if this means that they applaud all of his harsher utterances, or simply his defiance and longevity in the face of adversity. Watching Mr. Hitler survive tenaciously on the tightrope, they're delighted to see it done.

Scary, isn't it?

Note: This is not as absurd a parallel as one might think. Hitler did use humor - of a mordant sort. He did have a bestseller (1933). He did make outrageous comments from time to time before assuming power - before people realized that he was serious.

Additional note:
We know that most people shy away from comparisons involving Hitler. We do too. But in this case it was felt to be warranted. All that was done in the rewrite above was replace various nouns (e.g. Hitler for Coulter, Germany for America, Mein Kampf for Slander, etc.) and personal pronouns. The Journal essay was a defense of Coulter's wild language. This substitution exercise was performed to show how the writer dismissed what she (or Hitler) actually said, that having a bestseller makes it all a big harmless joke, and therefore people shouldn't worry so much. We strongly disagree.
posted by Quiddity at 8/27/2002 07:42:00 PM