The "conservative" GOP?
Crackpots, rightists, and wingers
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Excerpt:
I suppose it's only through force of habit that we still use the phrase, "right-wing Republicans," which, like "unsolved mystery" or "free gift," is a tautological offense against our mother tongue - a distinctive distinction without a different difference. I mean, when was the last time you heard someone refer to a "left-wing socialist"? Once upon a time, the "right-wing" portion of "right-wing Republicans" did have a necessary adjectival meaning. It identified right-wing Republicans, as well as right-wing Republicans, in the unmistakable sense that those chaps were indeed but one wing of the party, and they were to the right of the internal others. That was a time when we occasionally spoke of liberal Republicans, or, with far more frequency, of moderate Republicans. But those species, as you know, are long since virtually extinct; they went the way of the hula hoop and the shiny metallic grille and the single-blade safety razor. They suffered a sustained assault of brutal ideological cleansing; they are, pretty much, no more. There are only the right wingers, which, as competitive slaughter would have it, means they're no "wing" at all. Republicans are just righties, radically rotten to the core.