Is this a fissure or a fracture?

In case you missed it (I did, because I'm way too busy to spend my time tracking right-wing lunatics), but Ann Coulter's new book includes an emphatic defense of the Council Of Concerned Citizens. Southern Poverty Law Center has the particulars.

In her latest foaming-mouth tome — Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 — Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a “thinly veiled white supremacist organization.” Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.”

Coulter could hardly be more wrong. And even if she can’t find time to read beyond a page of the CCC’s website, she really ought to know — after all, the organization where she frequently speaks, the Conservative Political Action Committee, has publicly banned the CCC from its annual gathering because it is racist. Also in the late 1990s, Jim Nicholson, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked GOP members to stay away from the CCC because of its “racist and nationalist views.”

Now we all know that Coulter specializes in pushing the outrage envelope as a strategy to sell more books, and she's quite good at it. But when someone like Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs calls Coulter out for her support of CCC, it's an indicator that she may have miscalculated as to what she can get away with. And Johnson says he's getting hate mail from some of Coulter's supporters for calling her out.

This is no small thing that's happening. LGF has been a pretty steadfast supporter of Coulter in the past, and this would seem to be the beginnings of a break between Johnson and his more deranged readers.

I agree with precisely nothing that the people at LGF say in most cases, but I'll give Johnson props for calling Coulter's support of racism exactly what it is - beyond the pale. Maybe conservatives are starting to realize the hatemongers in their midst are doing their cause no favors, and the smarter ones are almost ready to cut them loose. We can only hope, however slim that hope might be.