Ann Coulter is a left-wing Democrat?

"[T]he left wing of the Democratic Party, frankly, kind of admires American terrorists" - Newt Gingrich, offering "analysis" on the Fox News "news" network.

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building" - Ann Coulter, Aug. 26, 2002

Gingrich went on to say that the left-wing Democrats (by which, of course, he means Democrats - thank you for the heads up, George Orwell) don't care that Louis Farrakhan is anti-semitic and that they "shrug off Jeremiah Wright."

This is the sort of stuff that ought to make every reasonable American in the country want to see the Republican party in its current incarnation crumble into the dust of history. Louis Farrakhan is an extremist and a bigot but has zero influence over the Democratic Party (when was the last time we heard of a Democratic president vetting Supreme Court nominees with Farrakhan?) There are scores of extremist bigot religious figures, however, that have significant influence over the Republican Party. Pat Robertson, with his promotion of New World Order anti-semitic conspiracy theory, springs to mind.

In a fiery speech delivered in Chicago on Feb. 26, Louis Farrakhan attacked"international bankers" for promoting this century's wars so that their "central banks" could collect interest off loans to the combatants. The bankers he singled out for ignominy were Jewish -- the Rothschilds in Europe, and, in America, their alleged agent Paul Warburg.

Does any of this sound familiar? It will to students of the anti-Semitic ravings of Depression-era demagogues. But, far more disturbing, some of Mr. Farrakhan's points might also hit home with the members of the Christian Coalition, who have scooped up more than a half-million copies of their leader Pat Robertson's tome "The New World Order" since its publication in 1991.

Like Mr. Farrakhan, Mr. Robertson overdramatizes Paul Warburg's role as the "true draftsman" and "catalyst" of the sinister U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, in 1913. Such is Mr. Robertson's fascination with the Rothschilds that he calls The Economist, an independent magazine that once had a Rothschild as its chairman, "the Rothschild publication."

And then there's the overlap of logic.

Farrakhan: "In order to fight a war, governments had to borrow money. They borrowed money from these central banks. The central banks waxed rich because they loaned money and charged interest. . . ."

Robertson: "The money barons of Europe, who had established privately owned central banks like the Bank of England, found in war the excuse to make large loans. . . ."

But it gets better. One of the motivating factors for Timoth McVeigh was that he believed he was striking a blow against the New World Order. Frank Rich, the author of the above editorial, had also noticed the ideological connection between Timothy McVeigh and Pat Robertson in a previous editorial

The prime radio crackpot in proximity to the bombing is Mark ("of Michigan") Koernke, the janitor and short-wave broadcaster who is a favorite of far-right militias in general and, by many accounts, of Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers in particular. Koernke transcripts on the Internet -- as well as his Tuesday interview on "Prime Time Live" -- reveal that his ideas are not only incendiary but mimic the published credos of Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Coalition and a major force within the Republican Party.

Death to the new world order!" is a typical Koernke sign-off. In his conspiratorial view, a new one-world government, the so-called "new world order," threatens to rob Americans of their liberties, most especially the right to bear arms, and bring about "the conversion of the United States into an asset for the United Nations."

Defining "The New World Order" in his book of that title in 1991, Mr. Robertson also asked if it would force "the government of the United States to defer to the United Nations" and warned that "our constitutional right to keep and bear arms would be one of the very first casualties." As Mr. Koernke believes the new world order to be a plot by the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations abetted by George Bush, so Mr. Robertson ominously wrote that "a single thread runs from the [ Bush ] White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission. . . ." As Mr. Koernke has said that the Persian Gulf war was a plot "to see whether or not the American people would eat the new world order," so Mr. Robertson speculated that the gulf war was "a setup" for the same subversive purpose.

There are differences of emphasis between these two conspiracy theorists. Mr. Koernke refers only glancingly to Mr. Robertson's now-notorious canards about the role played by Jewish bankers. For his part, Mr. Robertson, writing before Waco, did not include the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms among his large web of co-conspirators. But the overall drift is identical: a potentially dictatorial Government is the enemy, and, in Mr. Robertson's words, "the task of good men now will be to fight with all their strength" to counter its threats to liberty.

That last bit from Rich is a bit dishonest, as by that Robertson meant to encourage people to join the Christian Coalition and take over the goverment via non-violent means. But it is beside the point: if you were to apply the standard of guilt by association that Gingrich and the rest are doing to Obama and Democrats then the Republican Party would be far more guilty by association. Once again we see how utterly phony these attacks are, which are not motivated out of principle but out of pure partisanship.

What Gingrich has done is to attempt to invert reality by accusing Democrats of doing the very thing that he and his Republican cohorts do.