Now that the Democrats have won the mid-term elections and are preparing to take the reins of power of the Congress, they are turning their attention to the really big issues of the day:
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.
That’s right! We evil Republicans are causing global warming, preventing women from killing their unborn babies and championing racism by refusing to call the Democrat Party what it wants to be called. The entire reason that the two major political parties can not work together on anything is all because George Bush calls the Democrats…Democrats. Apparently all of that stuff about ideological differences was all bunk. If only the President had only called them the Democratic Party. Then, everyone could have hugged and sung Kumbya.
Yeah, right!
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. There’s also something grating and coarse-sounding about this abbreviated appellation, like saying “Jew” instead of “Jewish.”
I was unaware that Jews see the term “Jew” as rude. I read many columns written by Jews where they refer to themselves as Jews all the time. I would think that if the term was considered rude by Jews, they would not use it.
There seems to be a pattern here. A few years back, the liberals in the Democrat Party were trying to distance themselves as far away as possible from the term liberal. Instead, they said, they were progressive, not liberal. Now, they want to be called the Democratic Party instead of the Democrat Party. It seems that every time the term used to describe what they are becomes associated with something the electorate despises, they want to change their name. Liberal did not obtain a bad connotation just because conservatives said so. It earned its bad connotation when liberals instituted policies which lead to bad economic policy (think Carter), bad foreign policy (think Clinton), and bad health care policy (think the other Clinton). The word Democrat is earning its bad connotation the same way.
As is almost always the case in politics, if the Democrat Party wants to remove the negative connotations to the word Democrat it should reform it’s policies and pay more attention to what they are doing. Crying about what people call them, especially when what people are calling them is the same thing that they have been called for over a hundred years, is only going worsen the connotation.
Then what are they going to do?
