Granny Doc has penned a spot-on diary about how we hurt ourselves when we let political correctness water down our political speech.
Those that try to control, and determine the meanings of words, forcing others to conform to their own version of "Good Speak", have a very checkered history on this planet. They do not mean to distort reality but, they in fact do.
I had a rhetoric professor who took it a step farther by asserting that language doesn't describe reality; it creates reality.
This is something that Republicans understand and exploit far better than we do. In fact, I've come to believe that it is the primary reason that they have been able to control the national discourse for the past quarter century.
Republicans understand that certain words and images have the ability to speak directly to our reptilian brains, bypassing logic altogether. When they call Hillary Clinton "shrill", for instance, they know that they are conjuring up archetypal images of nagging wives, bitchy older sisters and harsh school marms. Of course it's sexist, but in politics the side that bases its arguments on archetypes will always win more votes than the side that bases its arguments on reason.
Democrats used to be able to do this. Thomas Jefferson, the original Democrat, used the archetype of the oppressive dictator as the basis for the founding of this nation. FDR was not shy about evoking the Dickensian archetypes of greedy corporatists to push through the New Deal.
Now we have Democrats passing great legislation, while naming it things like SCHIP (Careful, don't step in the SCHIP!) and LIHEAP (Who left that LIHEAP in the middle of the floor?), while Republicans pass crappy legislation with names like "The Patriot Act" and "Blue Sky".
But it goes much deeper than this and as we debate among ourselves the appropriateness of calling John McCain "a senile, cancer-riddled, trigger-happy old man with an anger management problem," the Republicans are bypassing us and going right for the deepest recesses of the the American psyche.
The brilliant Charles Mudede, writing for The Stranger, explains how the Republicans are getting "primal with American politics":
McCain and his handlers have worked hard to show us that white women—Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in one ad, a parade of attractive young women in another—are captivated by Barack Obama. And they have good reason for doing this. Yes, Scarlett Johansson cannot say enough good things about Obama; yes, Kirsten Dunst will do anything she can to help him to get elected; yes, white women love Obama. Even white women who don't like men love Obama. McCain and his people want to exploit this enthusiasm among these young women, they want to rub our noses in it, they want to scream it from the rooftops: These sexually ripe white women, these women that most white men could never hope to possess, they are helpless before this man. McCain seeks to translate Obama's hard-won political currency into the primal terms of unbridled, white-female lust for black cock.
The last sentence of this paragraph shocked me too. But Mudede's right, this is where they're going with it. While we worry about offending old people or women (or retards or cripples or midgets), they're keeping this close by appealing to voters on a level beyond logic.
I can't count how many conversations I've had in which no one can figure out why the presidential race is so close. Logic dictates that Obama should be running away with it. We blame the polling methods, we blame the corporate media, we blame low-information voters, but those are, at most, minor factors. McCain is still in this race because Republicans are speaking a "language" we can't hear. They are speaking directly to the reptilian brain.
As much as we may hate it, our chances of victory hinge upon our ability to create competing primal messages. The senile old man is one of them. The shrill bitch is another. I'm sorry if it hurts your feelings. I know we should be better than that, and we can be, but we will lose.
This is the way politics has always worked, people. Save your sensitivities for your personal life.
As crude, racist and downright immoral as it sounds, Mudede's right, "Obama's cock is on all of our minds." And that's just where the Republicans want it to be.