Thursday, April 23, 2009

REPUBLICAN LANGUAGE POLICE WANT TO IMPOSE A POLITICALLY CORRECT SPEECH CODE -- ON REPUBLICANS

Or at least on one Republican:

Republican state party leaders are rebelling against new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele for failing to dub President Obama and the Democrats as "socialists." And the rebels insist that the label matters.

Even though Mr. Steele has called his Democratic adversaries "collectivists," at least 16 state leaders say the term lacks the pejorative punch needed to sway public opinion and want all 168 members of the Republican National Committee to debate and vote on it....

Publicly, Mr. Steele has shied away from using the socialist line....


I'm so old I remember when it was liberals who were supposedly obsessed with enforcing the use of "politically correct" language. But in recent years GOP language cops have tried to impose speech codes on Democrats -- remember Rudy Giuliani's exasperation at the fact that Democrats in one presidential debate "never mentioned the word Islamic terrorist, Islamic extremist, Islamic fascist, terrorist, whatever combination of those words you want to use, (the) words never came up"? Unfortunately for Giuliani and his fellow Republicans, nobody cared. But Republicans apparently can't stop themselves now. So they're imposing speech codes on one another.

I should point out that the resolution actually makes the demand that the RNC make the demand that the Democratic Party conform to a speech code:

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee call on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the American people by acknowledging that they have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party.

So it's actually kind of a language-police daisy chain.

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