How MSNBC & NBC & Letterman Snookered Red Into Blue

Mark Helperin explains how suddenly the Red of Red China & the Blue of True Blue Conservatism morphed into their opposites almost overnight.

The nation appears more and more able to eat whatever words are shoved down its throat. It is told, and does not protest, that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is indeed a religion of peace, but it is also, quite demonstratively and throughout the world in proof after proof day after day, a religion of war.

As the president travels about, yelling at America and dividing the population into good people and bad people (the bad ones being, purely by coincidence, those who don't vote for him), he has adopted an extraordinary war cry that might make both Huey Long and Spiro Agnew smile in their graves: Millionaires and billionaires. Income or net worth, he doesn't say, the idea being to grab a billionaire, turn him upside down, and shake money out of him. But in the president's logic, this includes, for example, a couple earning $125,000 apiece. The trick is that you can indeed get a lot of money out of such people if you call them billionaires and turn enough of them upside down.

Perhaps the most brazen language diktat has been the mischievous switch of political colors. Stalin would hardly believe it, but blue now supposedly signifies the left and red the right. According to Wikipedia and the Washington Post, so it must be true, the change came in 2000 courtesy of MSNBC and NBC's "Today" show. It next migrated to David Letterman at CBS, and then went bacterial. The spirit of the change is reminiscent of the cable TV directory that read, "The World's Best Ho . . ." when space was clearly available for "tels." One can imagine the high-pitched giggling at this naughtiness. Saddling your political rivals with a symbol to which they have been historically opposed is an even better and naughtier joke. Either it was that or numbing cluelessness.

John Cardinal Newman was among those philosopher/philologists [along with Nietszche] who affirmed that the first sign of the decadence of a nation turning into absolute decomposition is the decline of language and grammar. Nowadays every single idiot on the left says "between you and I" and "I was laying down" to the extent that most young people don't know the correct grammar.... Object of a preposition and the correct past tense are now meaningless.

This is Gramsci at work. As the old socialist presidential candidate used to say, "The USA will awaken one day to find itself a socialist country without the name ever being used in political discourse."