This Just In: R-Word Thrown Around Far Too Much by Left

At the HuffPo, Lee Stranahan explains “Why Anderson Cooper Botched the Billion Dollar Pigford Story.” Along the way, Stranahan writes:

In the Rally To Restore Sanity, Jon Stewart (an Anderson Cooper fan) actually covered this racism stuff a little. He said…

If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate — just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more.

There’s a reason Stewart said it — a lot of my fellow liberals throw around the term ‘racist’ way too much.

If you’re a progressive and you think the right tosses out the term ‘socialist’ like an odd form of Ayn Rand Tourette’s Syndrome, just take a look at the comments section of your favorite left wing blog (including HuffPost, to be fair) and see how often the word ‘racist’ gets used as pretty much the sole argument against someone.

Or as George Will dubbed it last year, Liberal McCarthyism.

Meanwhile, at Power Line, Paul Mirengoff writes, “Declaring the label ‘socialist’ to be off-limits seems particularly odd:”

Socialism is a respectable, though in my view seriously misguided, set of beliefs. These beliefs are widely held in Europe and, if public opinion polls are to believed, far from uncommon here. According to a Gallup poll taken early this year, 36 percent of Americans have a positive view of socialism.

When I was a socialist, it never bothered me to be called one by those who were willing to debate my views on the merits.

After it moved hard left in late 2008 and early 2009, Newsweek certainly seemed rather enamored of the S-word during the heady initial days of the Obama administration.

Update: “You Get What You Pay For.”