You can always spot a loser when you encounter someone who can dish it out but not take it. Get a load of this leftywhine from the LA Times:
Will President Bush put the "-ic" back in "Democratic"?That was the hot topic around Washington on Monday after the president was asked why, during his State of the Union address last week, he referred to Congress' new "Democrat majority." "That was an oversight," Bush said in an interview Monday with National Public Radio. "I'm not trying to needle…. I didn't even know I did it." The issue of whether it is a slur to refer to the Democratic Party without the "-ic" has become an irritant. It comes at a time when Democrats and Republicans are trying to figure out whether they can work together, after years of fierce partisanship in the nation's capital.
It's only 'fierce partisanship' when the Republicans do it. It's ok when the Democrats do it and when some Republican complains about Democrats engage in partisan bickering, insults, or name-calling, the Democrats immediately start crying that the Republicans are trying to stifle dissent.
Here is what an 'expert' on political locution has to say about it:
And experts on political locution say it's a deliberate, if ungrammatical, linguistic strategy. "The word 'democratic' has such positive emotional valence … so they politicize it to use it as a term to describe a group of political rivals," said Roderick P. Hart, a professor of communications and government at the University of Texas in Austin.
I don't know a blessed thing about Roderick, but I would be willing to wager that he votes Democrat.
And then the LA Times resorts to the favorite smear that the left has been using for 50 years: Accusing the Republicans of McCarthyism!
Whatever the initial impulse or rationale, the term became controversial as far back as the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) famously used it to deride Democrats during his hearings investigating whether Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government.
No comments:
Post a Comment