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What This Politically (In)Correct Campaign Tells Us

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

"Political correctness" may be the most intriguing issue to emerge in the current presidential election cycle, especially for Republicans. Yet it also may be the most under-discussed, perhaps out of fear that it would not be politically correct to do so.

In Friday's Republican debate in Des Moines, Iowa, for example, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz criticized President Barack Obama for refusing to use the diplomatically inflammatory term "Islamic terrorism" and then attacked "political correctness" as if he had not been practicing a conservative version of PC against Obama.

Earlier, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump sarcastically tweeted about his least-favorite Fox News anchor, "I refuse to call Meghan Kelly a bimbo because that would not be politically correct."

What is PC? A mostly pejorative term to describe language, rules and policies intended to avoid offending particular groups in society.

That also is a pretty good definition of what we used to call simply "good manners" and "common decency" before the smart-sounding label "PC" caught on in the early 1990s.

Popularized initially by left-progressives to poke fun at the excesses of their fellow lefties, it soon was embraced and broadcast by the right to express their outrage at the left's excesses too.

 

I agree that PC is a menace when it infringes on free speech; however, contrary to popular mythology, neither left nor right has a monopoly on it.

For example, New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait sounded alarms recently in January under the headline, "Not a Very PC Thing to Say: How the Language Police Are Perverting Liberalism."

He raised some legitimate points, such as the excesses of leftist students who protest commencement speakers whose views they don't like.

But as John K. Wilson, author of the 1995 book "The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education," blogged, Chait said nothing about right-wing calls to censor commencement speakers such as President Barack Obama.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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