Calling Democratic Party "Democrat Party" Is Straight From Joe McCarthy's Playbook

I knew this from years of reading on McCarthyism, but Pensito Review's clear summary is worth a read (God only knows there simply is no American better to emulate than the hateful Joe McCarthy):

Exhuming McCarthy: Pres. Bush’s deliberate use of the term “Democrat Party” in his State of the Union speech this month has put this too-cleverly couched linguistic smear back in the spotlight.

Misusing the noun Democrat as an adjective is just one of dozens of deceptive verbal tricks the Republicans used to gain power over the past few decades.

Republican politicans use this mangled syntax to express solidarity with their toothless, knuckledragging base. They don’t appear to care that, to independent voters and Democrats listening in, it makes them sound like the flaming assholes they are.

The origin of the Democrat smear is both surprising and not the least shocking. The man who first popularized it was Sen. Joe McCarthy — whose witch hunt against commies in the 1950s was nearly as destructive to the Republican Party then as George Bush’s needless war in Iraq is now:

[The] term became controversial as far back as the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) famously used it to deride Democrats during his hearings investigating whether Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government. During the 1956 Republican convention, the usage was so common that it prompted the New York Times to report that dropping the “-ic” had become official party policy.

“‘Democratic’ as an adjective is not descriptive of the party as it exists today,” GOP spokesman L. Richard Guylay explained in that report, referring to allegations of vote-fixing by the Democratic Party’s political machine in large cities. “I can’t consider the party of the Pendergasts or Tammany Hall as a democratic party.”

In 1957, writing about the phenomenon in American Speech, the quarterly journal of the American Dialect Society, scholar Ignace Feuerlicht wrote: “It will be interesting to see whether ‘Democrat Party’ will stay with us or go out of existence again or be revived and revitalized at intervals just before successive national elections.”

Just FYI: ever wonder what made Sean Penn so political?

Well, besides being obviously very smart himself, Sean and his entire family was hurt by Joe McCarthy when his father was one of the many people blacklisted because they would not willingly participate in the Red Scare witch hunts.