Ann Coulter revealed her inner Lyndon LaRouche last night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show:

Coulter: This has nothing to do with reality. There -- I mean, most of the things, it's not a matter of forgiving Rush for saying them, he never said them -- but one thing that I think might be, I don't know, in my book, unforgivable, would be being a Nazi collaborator. And oh yeah, part of the consortium trying to buy the St. Louis Rams is still George Soros, who admitted on TV to having collaborated with the Nazis. But he's fine, because he owns the Democratic Party.

... But in any event, I would wager that a fair number of the players would agree more with Rush Limbaugh's politics than with George Soros' politics. I mean, not for nothing, a lot of them are Christians, point one. Point two -- and I mean real Christians, you know, Christ Christians -- and point two, they make a lot of money. I don't know that they like all these tax-and-spend plans of the Democrats. So I wouldn't hold it against the players. It's just these wussy owners --

Hannity: I want to know if Dave Checketts is now going to tell Soros to take a hike. Maybe that's the next question. Somebody needs to ask the NFL if they want George Soros to be a part owner. If this is the world we live in --

Coulter: An admitted -- right -- and he's an admitted Nazi collaborator. He pointed out who the Jews were in Hungary when he was 15 years old. He admitted that to Steve Croft on TV.

She's right, this explanation certainly had nothing to do with reality. Leaving aside the absurdity of claiming that NFL owners -- who are probably some of the most right-wing rock-ribbed group of Republicans in business -- were being "politically correct" and "prejudiced against conservatives" (as Hannity put it) ... And the absurdity of claiming that "he didn't say those things" by cherry-picking two fake racist quotes while ignoring the twenty genuine racist quotes ...

Coulter is not just grossly, immorally distorting Soros' story, she is also flat-out lying about it too. The claim that Soros was a "Nazi collaborator" originated with the LaRouche organization and has since spread to the likes of David Horowitz.

The facts: Soros was a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust. From Media Matters:

Michael T. Kaufman wrote in a biography of Soros, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire (Knopf, 2002), that Soros' father attempted to protect his family from Nazi persecution by paying an employee of Hungary's Ministry of Agriculture named Baumbach to take in Soros, "ostensibly as his godson." Soros accompanied his "godfather" as he went to oversee the confiscation of property from Hungarian Jews, as Media Matters has noted.

This is also where Coulter actually lies about Soros, too -- and it's an outrageous lie, too. Soros never was involved in "pointing out Jews" -- he simply accompanied his protector while he carried out his civic duties, which included confiscating property from Jews.

Here's the relevant passage from the 60 Minutes interview in question:

Kroft: You're a Hungarian Jew ...

Soros: Mm-hmm.

Kroft: ... who escaped the Holocaust ...

Soros: Mm-hmm.

Kroft: ... by posing as a Christian.

Soros: Right.

Kroft: And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.

Soros: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made.

Kroft: In what way?

Soros: That one should think ahead. One should understand that -- and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a -- a very personal threat of evil.

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.

Kroft: I mean, that's -- that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

Soros: Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't ... you don't see the connection. But it was -- it created no -- no problem at all.

Kroft: No feeling of guilt?

Soros: No.

Kroft: For example, that, 'I'm Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.' None of that?

Soros: Well, of course, ... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was -- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in the markets -- that is I weren't there -- of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would - would -- would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the -- whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the -- I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.

Of course, it's easy for someone in her comfy chair in an American TV studio in 2009 to second-guess the choices made in 1944 by a young Jewish man swept up in the horror of the ongoing Holocaust. But it's clear that people like Coulter and Hannity have never really understood the special evil the Nazis inflicted on their victims, both the dead and the survivors.

The evil genius of the Nazi regime lay in how it inflicted itself on the populace at large by creating a world of the most vicious Social Darwinism in action -- survival of the fittest, the "fittest" being the most cunning and ruthless and conscienceless. Anyone who failed or refused to play along with this vision of the world simply did not survive. And those who did often found afterward that they had sacrificed their humanity along the way.

The Nazis imposed on their world a social regime in which the worst traits of humanity -- greed, selfishness, mendacity, betrayal, cowardice -- become the supreme social traits, not just in the camps (though there especially) but throughout Nazi society, because it was precisely those traits which insured one's survival.

And there's a funny thing about all this: Three of the most prominent promoters of Social Darwinism on the current media scene -- they like to call it "free enterprise" a la Ayn Rand -- are Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity. Strange how that works, isn't it?