Sunday, April 04, 2010

Regime change

It used to be, "regime" was perfectly acceptable when used to describe an administration in the US. "Used to be". PrairiePundit: Left changes position on use of 'regime'

Citing Byron York:

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews appeared deeply troubled by the word. "I've never seen language like this in the American press," he said, "referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election -- we will have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years -- fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country…. We know that word, 'regime.' It was used by George Bush, 'regime change.' You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Limbaugh] to stop using it."

Matthews didn't stop there. "I never heard the word 'regime,' before, have you?" he said to NBC's Chuck Todd. "I don't even think Joe McCarthy ever called this government a 'regime.'"

It appears that Matthews has suffered a major memory loss. I don't have the facilities to search for every utterance of Joe McCarthy, but a look at more recent times reveals many, many, many examples of the phrase "Bush regime." In fact, a search of the Nexis database for "Bush regime" yields 6,769 examples from January 20, 2001 to the present.
....
Finally – you knew this was coming – on June 14, 2002, Chris Matthews himself introduced a panel discussion about a letter signed by many prominent leftists condemning the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror. "Let's go to the Reverend Al Sharpton," Matthews said. "Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?"

Oops. Perhaps Joe McCarthy never called the U.S. government a regime, but Chris Matthews did. And a lot of other people did, too. So now we are supposed to believe him when he expresses disgust at Rush Limbaugh doing the same?

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