Trump/Palin accuse liberals of using "political correctness kind of like a suicide vest".

[pampango]

Palin said:

“Well, he being the only one who’s been willing, he’s got the guts to wear the issues that need to be spoken about and debate on his sleeve, where the rest of some of these establishment candidates, they just wanted to duck and hide. They didn’t want to talk about these issue until he brought ‘em up. In fact, they’ve been wearing a, this, political correctness kind of like a suicide vest. And enough is enough. These issues that Donald Trump talks about had to be debated. And he brought them to the forefront. And that’s why we are where we are today with good discussion. A good, heated, and very competitive primary is where we are. And now though, to be lectured that, “Well, you guys are all sounding kind of angry,” is what we’re hearing from the establishment. Doggone right we’re angry! Justifiably so! Yes! You know, they stomp on our neck, and then they tell us, “Just chill, okay just relax.” Well, look, we are mad, and we’ve been had. They need to get used to it.”

The phrase originated among American Communists, possibly as early as the 1940s and may initially have been a Jewish-American socialist critique of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Jewish-American Communists found that one a hard pill to swallow, but were told to toe the party line , and they said they refused to be “politically correct.” But its contemporary resonances come out of the 1970s and 1980s, when liberals, feminists and New Leftists used it to make fun of doctrinaire positions of any sort.

So what did Palin mean by “politically correct” being used by politicians as a sort of terrorism? She meant that in normal American society it has become inappropriate to say racist things in public, about immigrants and minorities. And she is suggesting that anyone who orally reproaches Trump and Palin for this racism is exercising a form of terrorism.

So frank racism is not only being rehabilitated by Trump and his acolytes like Palin, but Trump is associating it with patriotism. The notion of “not having time for” respectful and ethical political language because the country is allegedly in the throes of an extreme crisis is classic fascism. Basic constitutional rights and even just common decency need to be jettisoned because we are in a hurry over this vague and never-specified menace.

http://www.juancole.com/2016/01/palin-for-trump-political-correctness-anti-racism-is-a-suicide-bomb-vest.html

[KG]

1. political correctness kind of like a suicide vest - what's that even sposed to mean?

more word salad form an incoherent nut-bag

[JHB]

2. I remember the exact point where that phrase gained cachet ouside lefty circles...

February 10, 1992, in a speech by former Attorney General Edwin Meese at Harvard Law School, that was widely reported on and promoted, particularly on the Right.

Meese Speaks at Law School Forum
Stresses Importance of Ensuring Free Speech, Freedom of the Press
By Perry Q. Despeignes, CONTRIBUTING REPORTER February 11, 1992

Speaking at a Harvard Law School Forum last night, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III defended federal restrictions on the content of Planned Parenthood consultations while warning of the danger that "politically correct" speech codes pose to First Amendment rights.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1992/2/11/meese-speaks-at-law-school-forum/

At the time I thought it was a little odd that they'd latch on to that particular phrase, but then I remembered something else:

This was:
1) almost a year after the Soviets had been absolutely sidelined in the response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War,
2) almost six months since the failed coup by Soviet hardliners to oust Gorbachev, and
3) about a month and a half after the Soviet Union was dissolved completely.

In other words, it featured prominently in a heavily-promoted speech at the precise moment in history when even the most dinosaurine Conservative couldn't maintain the fiction that Liberals and Lefties were "on orders straight from the Kremlin" without losing all credibility beyond a relative handful of true-believing goobers.

The Soviets had become useless as a means of painting Liberals and Lefties as fools, dupes and active agents of a foreign power ideologically driven to wreck the country. Useless as a brush with which to paint L&Ls as traitors and as a DISloyal opposition, for stoking anger against them.

So they shifted gears and cloudsourced it: goodbye slavishly following "orders from Moscow", in the new version there's just this weird ideological cloud of anti-Americanism that motivates Liberals and the Left. In some ways it works even better, because it's even more malleable: it can cover whatever you want it to cover as long as you keep thumping the drum.

[lpbk2713]

3. That's it? That's the best they can come up with? BWAHAHA

Trump's rhetoric has backed them backed up into a corner and the
best they can do compares to bailing out the Titanic with a teacup.

[spanone]

4. what a bunch of twisted little ninnies