Although it increasingly seems like another millenia, it was only three weeks ago that Newsweek told us that…

But now the New York Times, one of Newsweek’s chief competitors in the realm of northeast corridor establishment liberal punditry that’s tarted up with a soupcon of reporting, sniffs:

Conservatives might be seeking a spiritual leader, organizing principle and fresh identity, but they at least seem to have settled on a favorite rhetorical ogre: socialism.

As in, Democrats are intent on forcing socialism on the “U.S.S.A” (as the bumper sticker says, under the words “Comrade Obama”).

It seems that “socialist” has supplanted “liberal” as the go-to slur among much of a conservative world confronting a one-two-three punch of bank bailouts, budget blowouts and stimulus bills. Right-leaning bloggers and talk radio hosts are wearing out the brickbat. Senate and House Republicans have been tripping over their podiums to invoke it. The S-bomb has become as surefire a red-meat line at conservative gatherings as “Clinton” was in the 1990s and “Pelosi” is today.

But how can it be a slur, when Newsweek says we’re all socialists? Presumably Obama is included in “all”, unless, like his warm-act 2000 years ago, he is both flesh, and yet beyond our corporeal plane, simultaneously.

Actually, maybe they’re all incorrect. Circuitously, a former Timesman on the left coast notes that Newsweek and the CPAC goers are both off in applying the S-word to BHO; Jonah Goldberg writes that Robert Scheer “Remembers His Marxism.”

Or at least his Maxwell House.