On the playground with the GOP

I've revisited this topic several times now, but I never tire of it. It's the hopelessly juvenile-- yet wildly successful-- right-wing war against "ic."

The Daily Howler takes a look at those (like our president) who insist on saying "Democrat Party." And demonstrates that even when a reporter calls it like it is, something still goes wrong for the donkey.

At any rate, Marcus also noticed this usage by Bush, as she notes in this morning’s Post. “The derisive use of ‘Democrat’ in this way was a Bush staple during the recent campaign,” she writes—after earning her stripes as a sensible centrist with this perplexing locution:

MARCUS (11/22/06): 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 it prefers?”

Ruthie! The Democratic Party doesn’t “prefer” to be called the Democratic Party—that’s the actual name of the party! (. . .)

MARCUS (11/22/06): But Democrat-as-epithet has seen its fullest flowering—on talk radio, among congressional leaders and, more than with any of his predecessors, from the president himself—during the recent Republican heyday. 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.