Right Wing Nut House

I have given up my one man quest to protect the English language from right wing Visigoths who insist in raping, pillaging, and burning their way through the dictionary - corrupting definitions and creating havoc with meaning while doing their utmost to make intelligent discourse impossible.

Why bother? Definitions of “socialism” and “Communism” have been bent, spindled, and mutilated until they are not words anymore at all, but rather daggers with which they plunge their hate and unbalanced, unreasoned antagonisms into the breast of their political opponents. Apparently, many on the right have no more reverence for the conventions of language than many on the left who are guilty of similar transgressions against our shared lexicon. In this way, the connecting tissue is excessive ideology where all convention is eschewed and made to serve as slave to the passions of the political moment.

Case in point: Today’s blow up over the flag at Ground Zero being pulled up before President Obama spoke. Or something. Doug Ross, among others, rushed into the fray after a tweet from ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper that read; “One minute to air and they decided to take the flag down from the live shot!” President Obama didn’t want the American flag to spoil his moment in the sun, and equating the waving flag with “spiking the football” - or at least that’s what Ross and other bloggers firmly believed.

It turns out that the photo - and Tapper’s comment - were from an hour after Obama had his photo-op at Ground Zero. Before then, an excitable and indignant Ross wrote:

This administration and, by extension, the Democrat Party are now so thoroughly divorced from the history, traditions and morals of America that we might as well admit the Marxist left has executed a successful coup d’état on this Republic.

The mindlessness, the out of control idiocy represented in that one comment says volumes about many on the right, who toss around words like “Marxist” and concepts like “coup d’etat” as casually as if they were discussing the weather. The actual, literal meaning of Marxism is irrelevant as is what the concept of coup d’etat represents. What matters, according to the fire breathers, is that they are weapons in the unending battle against the forces of evil and no convention is too sacred to toss aside in search of victory in this war.

If challenged, they fall back on definition by example, i.e. “Well, dey took over dem car companies, right? Marxists, I say!” It is doubtful that Ross, or any of the bloggers who linked and aped his manifestly absurd blog post would know a true Marxist if they came up and bit him. Democrats are Democrats. Marxists are Marxists. The Democrats are a political party. Marxism is a political philosophy. They resemble each other like an apple resembles an 800 pound gorilla. To use them in the same sentence, much less aver that Marxists have taken over the Democratic party (yes, the Democratic party, not the “Democrat party”), is an insult to the common language that is our birthright as Americans.

Never mind that Ross et al made a stupid mistake about the flag. Liberals do that all the time and never apologize or even recognize it. What concerns me and should concern anyone with any reverence for the English language, is that jamokes like Ross - and there are thousands of them on the right who use these ill-chosen descriptives every day - are either too ignorant to know what the real definitions of “socialist,” “communist,” and “Marxist” are, or don’t care about the violence they do to language by using them.

I guess referring to Obama and the Democrats as “liberals” just doesn’t cut it anymore.