For more than two decades conservatively-inclined Republicans have loved to smugly dismiss anything they didn’t like by labeling it as “politically correct” or “PC” turning a positive term, coined by the Founding Fathers no less. into a pejorative.
So it is kind of fun as an Independent to watch them hammer one of their own into submission this week for saying something, well, politically incorrect, although it is something many conservatives believe but aren’t saying.
“The shoe certainly fits” but I’m not sure why they didn’t evidence the same demand for conformance when David Stockman, the late conservative President Reagan’s budget director and someone ultimately familiar with “supply-side” economics, labeled the now adopted Republican debt reduction proposal as an “attack on the poor to coddle the rich” less than a month ago in a New York Times Op-Ed entitled The Bipartisan March To Fiscal Madness.
Columnist Maureen Dowd had already famously written a few weeks before that “Republicans hate social engineering, unless they are doing it.”
So why did the always hyperbolic Newt Gingrich cause such a stir by saying much the same thing even being forced to “kiss” Limbaugh’s ring? Is there something the conservative establishment fears about the famously “loose cannon” or are they just much too PC now themselves to tolerate honest debate among the ranks?
All I know is that whenever someone in the future tries to cut off thoughtful discussion by dismissing it as PC, I know what I’m going to say.
Something about “newterizing” open and honest discussion.
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