"You Don't Get It"

In a column which is very much worth reading, "Buzz Phrases That Deaden The Mind", Dick Meyer writes,

"Liberal bias" (LB) plays the exact same, irritating role for conservatives, Republicans and Clinton-Gore-haters. Michael Moore and Al Franken make good money with YDGI ["You Don't Get It"]. Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and literally scores of talk radio hosts make good money on LB.

The Washington Post is biased. The Washington Times is not. Get it?

Once the LB card is played, there can be no retort. You don't have a position, you have only a bias. I have no bias, just the power of true facts and pure logic, ergo I win.

As elitist as YDGI is, LB is more clever. The transformation of the word "liberal" into an insult is one of the great feats of ideological alchemy of the history of American political ideas. George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were all liberal. But now the word is a socially acceptable ethnic slur.

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