I have long advocated maintaining a precision in the English language, because sloppiness in language inevitably leads to a sloppiness of thinking. With all of the issues great and small that face the American public, we simply cannot afford sloppy thinking.
Enter two newly coined words: "birther" and "truther". "Truther" was out there first. (Sometimes "troofer") It described a conspiracy kook that believed that the Bush administration was somehow involved or directed ordered the death of nearly three thousand people on 9/11. Charles Krauthammer on "trutherism":
...this is no trivial matter. It’s beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It’s dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with “truthers.”
You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier — a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.
Unfortunately for liberals and Democrats, most "truthers" reside in their party.
So, what's a good liberal to do? How do you somehow deflect attention away from the whackadoodle conspiracy wing of the Democratic party? Find some equivalence.
Enter the "birthers". I'm sure that "birther" was coined precisely to grant a false equivalence to the two groups. I mean, both words end in "ther", they must be the same right? And granted, there are some birthers who are ardent conspiracy theorists, but are the two groups equivalent? Not at all. One group believes, rightly or wrongly that a single politician, who may have something to hide that would adversely affect his own political career, has been less than forthcoming with his own personal credentials.
The other group, believes, without a whit of credible evidence, that a politician murdered three thousand people through some convoluted and sinister shadow government so that he could wage war on yet more people around the world. And though the logistics to carry out such a murder on a grand scale would require hundreds of people to be complicit and soulless enough to maintain their silence, not one person has come forth with a guilty conscience, a damning document or a smoking gun.
As much as the liberals would love for you to make the false "Birther"/ "Truther" Equivalence, it is a linguistic sleight of hand. The most rabid "birther" cannot hold a candle to the utter derangement it takes to be a "Truther". The Left would just as soon that you not notice that.
Cross posted at Say Anything
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