Update: Various responses, including Edwards and some conservatives, at Editor and Publisher.

Ann Coulter, featured and cherished main speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, called John Edwards a faggot and got a standing ovation, actually a standing, screaming, cheering ovation. There is lots of commentary about this, though very little in the major media which seems to have exhausted their attention to such matters with a feeding frenzy over two bloggers hired by Edwards a few weeks back. For starters you can’t do better than Glen Greenwald at Salon (ad view needed.)

This is a movement propelled by an insatiable hunger for more slaughter and more wars. It is centrally dependent upon hatred of an Enemy, foreign or domestic — the Terrorist, the Immigrant, the Faggot, the Raghead, and most of all, the Liberal. As John Dean brilliantly documented, that is the only real feature that binds the “conservative” movement at this point, the only attribute that gives it identity and purpose. It does not have any affirmative ideas, only a sense of that which it hates and wants to destroy. So to watch as the crowd wildly cheers an unapologetic hatemonger is perfectly natural and not at all surprising.