The Democrat (sic) Party
This was what US House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had to say about the Democrats in July of last year, when he spoke to one thousand Republican college students. To assure accuracy in quoting the GOP leader and to give him the benefit of the doubt, I’m citing a Fox News story about the speech:
“The national Democrat Party seems to have lost its marbles,” DeLay, R-Texas, said as he announced that Republicans are no more on the defensive, but are launching a counter-attack against Democratic criticism of the war in Iraq.
DeLay said the criticism was born of pure partisan hate, void of logic or reason.
“Their single organizing philosophy is an irrational, all-encompassing broiling hatred of George W. Bush,” DeLay said. “Most of all, Democrats hate the president because on every political issue of significance since he came to office, he has beaten them like rented mules.”
While I’m upset about DeLay’s obvious insensitivity to the welfare of mules, rented or otherwise, this is not the reason I draw your attention to his comments. Nor is it the fact that the mules have turned around and started kicking the president. No, I wanted to see if you picked up on something at the beginning of DeLay’s drivel. He said the “national Democrat Party.” Not “Democratic” Party. In case you haven’t noticed in listening to Republicans speaking about the loyal opposition, that was not a mere slip-up or innocent mistake. It wasn’t Bush-speak. It is a virtual rule of proper Republican behavior to say “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party.”
You don’t believe me? Here are a few more examples of GOP etiquette:
From New Hampshire Republican Committee News
Jayne Millerick, Chairman of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, released the following statement in response to a new radio ad released today by the Democrat Party:
From the Republican Party of Virginia Web site:
Never before has the Democrat Party chosen the 1st and 4th most liberal members of the United States Senate to represent it in a presidential campaign.
How about this headline from conservative Web site OpinioNet:
The Democrat Party Will Die in 2004
From the Republican National Committee Web site’s section on the origins of the term “GOP”:
Indeed, the “grand old party” is an ironic term, since the Democrat Party was organized some 22 years earlier in 1832.
I first became aware of the tendency of many Republicans to refer to the “Democrat Party” back in the early eighties. I was the chief political reporter for WTHR-TV, the NBC affiliate in Indianapolis, the capital of the red state of Indiana. I remember sitting in the office of state GOP chairman Gordon Durnil one day. He sat back comfortably in his desk chair, puffing on his pipe and talking politics. It seemed like every minute or two, he punctured the avuncular image by snarling the term “Democrat Party” in a kind of Indiana drawl. I thought he relished saying it that way, enjoyed wrapping his tongue around this perfect encapsulation of disrespect. Over the years, as I noticed that Durnil wasn’t the only one employing the term, I wondered about how “Democrat Party” became part of the Republican vernacular. Here’s an explanation from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English
The proper noun is the name of a member of a major American political party; the adjective Democratic is used in its official name, the Democratic party. Democrat as an adjective is still sometimes used by some twentieth-century Republicans as a campaign tool but was used with particular virulence by the late senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who sought by repeatedly calling it the Democrat party to deny it any possible benefit of the suggestion that it might also be democratic.
Even though I don’t think Republicans like Tom DeLay really believe in the concepts underlying the democratic republic, i.e., they’re not genuine democratic republicans, I won’t start calling DeLay’s party the “Republic Party.” You get my point?
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Today’s Worth Checking Out
Read Eric Alterman’s piece about Fox News in the wake of the this week’s release of Outfoxed, a new documentary about Murdoch’s contribution to a civil society. Alterman’s article and some excellent evidentiary material - “The Reality Behind Fox News” can be found at the Center for American Progress. Also, see Salon’s review of Outfoxed.