Congressman Allen West is in trouble...

...for comparing the Democratic Party to the Nazis. Last week the Florida Republican said:

“If Joseph Goebbels was around, he’d be very proud of the Democrat Party, because they have an incredible propaganda machine.”

Now, West is one of those wacky tea partiers who was elected in 2010 and is expected to be out next November due to redistricting. So it's really not worth getting too upset about what he says. And, actually, it's not the Nazi reference that bothered me so much; that happens all the time. No, what irritated me was the way West referred to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat" Party. An accidental slip of the tongue, you say? Hardly. According to Media Matters (my emphasis):

The ungrammatical conversion of the noun "Democrat" to an adjective was the brainchild of Republican partisans, presumably an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being "democratic" -- or in the words of New Yorker magazine senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg, "to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation." In the early 1990s, apparently due largely to the urging of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective became near-universal among Republicans.

How did I know Frank Luntz was involved?

Hertzberg wrote that "among those of the Republican persuasion," the use of " 'Democrat Party' is now nearly universal" thanks to "Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo 'Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,' and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz." While Hertzberg noted that Luntz "road-tested the adjectival use of 'Democrat' with a focus group in 2001" and "concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the ... Democratic Party," he also wrote that Luntz had told him recently that "[t]hose two letters ['ic'] actually do matter," and that Luntz "recently finished writing a book ... entitled 'Words That Work.' "

(Can you imagine a party that thinks about stuff like this instead of working on policy? No wonder people like me no longer vote Republican.)

Now what do you suppose the right would do if Democrats started referring to the GOP as the "Republic" Party? Or the "Repub" Party? Or better yet, just the "Repuh" Party?

They'd probably compare them to Nazis.