If he wanted to, President Bush could change the tone in Washington with a single syllable: He could just say "ic." That is, he could stop referring to the opposition as the "Democrat Party" and call the other side, as it prefers, the Democratic Party.As the other side prefers, eh? Is that a little like how President Bush might prefer to be called "President Bush" instead of "Chimpy BushMcHitler" and similar epithets as the left-wing blogosphere is so fond of writing? And does that mean the "Iraq War" or the "Global War on Terror" or "World War III" as Republicans "prefer" could be accepted terminology for our current international conflicts instead of snide, routine references to "Bush's War" or "Bush's ill-advised war?" Well maybe not. Because all this nastiness is Bush's fault.
The derisive use of "Democrat" in this way was a Bush staple during the recent campaign. "There are people in the Democrat Party who think they can spend your money far better than you can," he would say in his stump speech, or, "Raising taxes is a Democrat idea of growing the economy," or, "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."Gosh, that Bush really is a bastard, isn't he? Every one of the above quotations encapsulates the truth. But he should downplay this lest the cut-and-run Democrats be offended, right? And that's not all. Bush is actually in good historical company, as nasty Republican partisans have been using the "-ic"-less term for Democrats since, gasp, the days of that evil, nefarious, and corrupt Republican Warren G. Harding:
The president isn't alone in his adjectival aversion to "Democratic" when it comes to the party. The provenance of the sneering label "Democrat Party" stretches back to the Harding administration. William Safire traced an early usage to Harold Stassen, who was managing Wendell Willkie's 1940 campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt. A party run by political bosses, Stassen told Safire for a 1984 column, "should not be called a 'Democratic Party.' It should be called the 'Democrat party.'"Sneering? Gosh, did anyone ever hear Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, the Sultana and Sultan of sneer, revile Bush, the Republicans, or our troops on a personal level in the run-up to the November elections? Or Al Gore? Or John Kerry? Heaven forefend! They would never do that! (Although you could even read the citations in the Post.) Yet there must be some reason why those mean-spirited Republicans are so, so disrespectful toward their betters. Ruth thinks she has found the smoking gun:
Democrat Party was used, pardon the phrase, liberally by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. According to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English," Democrat as an adjective is still sometimes used by some twentieth-century Republicans as a campaign tool but was used with particular virulence" by McCarthy, "who sought by repeatedly calling it the Democrat party to deny it any possible benefit of the suggestion that it might also be democratic." The word also achieved a prominent run with Bob Dole's especially ugly reference to "Democrat wars" during the 1976 vice presidential debate.Aha! Now we have it, the root of all evil. That Great Satan, Senator Joseph McCarthy—who, in spite of his drunkenness, verbal excesses, and bullying, actually did help expose the fifth columnists who still infest government, Hollywood, the media, and the arts—used the term "Democrat" with "particular virulence" as defined by the Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Which proves the case for Ruth, except for the fact that many written reference guides in standard library and college use today including this one (which is generally well-regarded) are reflexively sympathetic to left-of-center standards of meaning and interpretation.
Faux-intellectuals in textbooks, guides, dictionaries, and elsewhere, have employed the term "McCarthyism" along with references to the Wisconsin senator for over 50 years as an convenient to demonize the opposition, as it causes all discussion to cease when it is invoked, much like "racist," their other favorite show-stopper. This in turn has allowed these self-proclaimed intellectuals the opportunity to avoid constructive reasoning with their opponents for roughly the same time period.
The cited definition is selectively quoted and without context. And we should note the allegation that McCarthy used the term with "particular virulence" does not necessarily mean his usage was not a correct or merited usage. The Guide's author, English professor Kenneth G. Wilson, began his academic teaching career in 1951 and could not fail to have been influenced by the current events of his own times, however. But without a copy of the Guide, and operating with full knowledge of the MSM's propensity to shift meaning by denying access to context, we can't help being a bit skeptical here.
As to "Bob Dole's especially ugly reference to 'Democrat wars' during the 1976 vice-presidential debate?" Gosh, we should probably be offended by that, too, I guess. Except, see "Bush's war" above. Which, of course, is not a nasty or "ugly" term, but objective and factual as every intellectual and MSMer must know.
Having now emphasized the virulence and lineage of Bush's and the Republican's lack of respect for the Democrat, oops, I mean DemocratIC Party (sorry, sorry, please don't suspend this blog without due process) via linkages to the Harding and McCarthy demonologies that have become part of the left's sacred writ; and having cited the alleged final word on this, the Columbia Guide to Standard English, which is supposed to impress us, Marcus follows another argument from "authority," this time citing the presumably august and totally non-partisan Hendrik Hertzberg:
As Hendrik Hertzberg pointed out in the New Yorker in August, the conservative Web site NewsMax.com takes pains to scrub Associated Press copy "to de-'ic' references" to the party.Argument from authority, as we recall, is one of many logical fallacies that tend to undercut an argument, since, among other things, a cited authority may or may not be reliable. But it's one of the favorite tools of journos who are either too lazy to attempt objectivity or who might be running out of column inches or original thoughts.
As anyone who reads the New Yorker, even a hard lefty, would know—and Marcus clearly knows—Hertzberg, a lifetime doctrinaire socialist and onetime scribe for the disgraceful Jimmy Carter, has been the New Yorker's anti-Bush pit-bull throughout this president's entire term, including before the 2000 elections that brought him to power. Nearly every single week since, and with increasing recklessness and virulence, Hertzberg has slimed the President, his people, and the Americans who support him and his policies with a breathtaking disregard for the facts. His columns are caricatures of the Democrats' positions on most issues, particularly the War on Terror.
The fact that a given web-site takes pains to scrub the "-ic" off "Democratic" proves nothing, and it proves even less when the cited "fact" is attributed to a lifelong propagandist for the left and a notorious Bush-hater to boot. (As are, routinely, AP writers whose text was allegedly "scrubbed.") By citing Hertzberg as an authority on the matter of name-calling and civility, Marcus undercuts, entirely, her already feeble argument in favor of using terminology the Democrats prefer. It is a tribute to her intellectual myopia that she fails to see the irony in this. We're used to this so let's move on to the primary text:
But as a matter of simple politeness -- something the Bush family is famously good at -- it's rude to call people by a term that makes them bristle, even a seemingly innocuous one.Hold this in your thoughts for a moment. We should, once again, do exactly what the Democrats want because they want us to??? As a matter of "politeness"? So then, it follows that the Democrats should make nice with Bush, right? Maybe not:
In the few weeks since the election, the president has followed up his syrupy rhetoric of cooperation with a series of face slaps: pushing the doomed nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, resubmitting the equally doomed nominations of a quartet of offensive judicial selections and naming a physician to head the federal family planning program who works for clinics that refuse to offer birth control.The horror! The horror! Bush (who was still President the last time we looked) actually wants the nomination of his able UN ambassador to be confirmed, and his judicial picks as well! How dastardly! How little respect Bush shows the elites on the Democrat side of the aisle! How could America have re-elected such an obvious simpleton!
Of course, the Democrat heroes Marcus prefers have been happily rejecting or stalling the bulk of Bush's judicial nominees and a few others for the better part now of his two terms of office. But hey, let bygones be bygones rather than cover things up with "syrupy" rhetoric. Rather than indulge in "a series of face slaps" with "doomed" [by whom?] nominations, including those "offensive judicial selections." Offensive to whom, BTW? Marcus provides no guidance on this alleged offensiveness. But since she's a lefty journo, I guess we're supposed to accept this observation as a statement of fact. The fact is, Marcus is dodging the explanation for why the judicial selections are "offensive." So let's provide one:
These nominees are ideologically unacceptable to leftists. They are unlikely to legislate socialism from the bench.
Thus, there is no logical reason to oppose them unless you are ideologically biased in favor of allowing socialist jurists to usurp the prerogatives of the legislative branch, thus saving them from having to face the voters for endorsing boneheaded redistributionist legislation.
Perusing this paragraph once again cuts the knees out from under Marcus' already feeble argument in favor of civility. She is effectively stating that to the victor belongs the spoils, so Bush should cut and run and give in to the Democrats' wishes and desires. It's funny she never wrote that way when the Republicans controlled both houses. And we don't recall saying that when Clinton lost both houses of Congress to Newt's revolution and Hilary's DOA national healthcare scheme (it's ba-a-ack).
Marcus pilfers a little more theology from St. Hendrik to bolster her flagging position:
"'Democrat Party' is a slur, or intended to be -- a handy way to express contempt," Hertzberg wrote. "At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it's an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation."Hendrik ought to know a "slur" when he sees one, since he's been mastering the art of the slur for a lifetime. Contempt is precisely what he's been expressing toward Bush and the Republicans since even before 2000, trashing Bush at every turn and in the most colorful, most damning, and most absolute negative language possible, thrilling true-blue New Yorkers. Writers like Hertzberg and Marcus can indeed dish it out. But they can't take it.
It's clear that Marcus is on cruise-control in this trivial pre-holiday "evergreen" column, putting the bulk of the argumentation on Hertzberg's back by cribbing from his already-dated "Talk of the Town" column. But she's made a fundamental mistake if she expects this highly partisan hackwork to be taken seriously.
Here's the issue: Hertzberg, and by extension Marcus, are irritated at the Republicans' significant success in attacking an important cultural bastion of leftist ideology. Both writers want the Republicans to capitulate to preferred Democrat political usage. Dems are supposed to own words, and they want their preferred terminology back. Habitual use of the term "Democratic" in the media—as is indeed mostly the case anyway—would afford Democrats yet another of the countless small rhetorical and definitional victories that enable them to subvert the American way of life as it is viewed by a majority of middle-Americans.
Propagating the term "Democratic" to describe the Democrats would subtly connote that they, and only they, are synonymous with a "democratic" America. Which would continue to mask the Democrats' own stunning hypocrisy in this regard.
Hertzberg, a polished propagandist but no dummy, actually gets this. And he proves it in a passage Marcus neglects to cite since it's not germane to her polemic. Here's Hertzberg in his August column, just cited:
...among those of the Republican persuasion “Democrat Party” is now nearly universal. This is partly the work of Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz, the Johnny Appleseed of such linguistic innovations as “death tax” for estate tax and “personal accounts” for Social Security privatization. Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day. He added that he recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled “Words That Work”—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of “ic”s that his copy editor, one of those partisan Dems, had stuck in.[Link to the Luntz book above is by Wonker, and the book is not yet available, BTW.]
There you have it. And Hertzberg convince you that only Republicans play this game, look at the Democrats' mastery of it over the last 60 years, particularly in the Clinton Administration which camouflaged increased taxes as "revenue enhancements" and massive spending as "investments." Republicans are relatively new to this kind of rhetorical spin machine, and may actually have come too late to the party.
The point I'm ultimately making here is that, unlike Smith Barney in those old commercials, the Democrats have not earned the honorific "Democratic." They hate "the rich," whom they never define and are probably you and me; prevent free speech on campuses; refuse to vote on conservative judicial nominations (preferring instead subversive jurists who legislate a socialistic agenda from the bench); promote and reward anti-American writing in the media and anti-American representations in the arts; believe in choice in everything except schools; and either actively condemn or entirely freeze out from the publicity stream the large segments of this country's population that reject their party's largely Marxist utopian ideals, such as they are.
Calling this viral infestation the "Democratic Party" would put another nail in the coffin of truth and objectivity and win the propagandists of the left a major victory in the ongoing culture wars, subtly redefining their party as representatives of the "true America." They are, of course, nothing of the sort.
Marcus' column is facile, poorly-reasoned, and condescending. It lazily borrows its impetus from Hendrik Hertzberg's better but equally shallow column. Both writers demand civility toward themselves and their cadre while denying that same civility to their opponents. And both are typical of the kind of writer that is applauded, rewarded, and quoted by a left so eager to embrace its own narcissistic viewpoints that it has left truth, objectivity, and yes, civility far behind.
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