LOC: Death panels and euthanasia

With the climax of President Obama's health care insurance reform closing in on us, the number of crazy wingnut ideas is fast growing. That means it's time for me to update the Lexicon of Crazy. Today's new entries are death panels and euthanasia.

Stay tuned for further updates.

LOC: Empathy and Chrysler dealerships

Earlier this month, the front-pagers and posters at Balloon Juice evolved a new theory of wingnuttery to replace the rapidly-discredited idea of Peak Wingnut: the Wingularity. As described by KG at his new blog The Wingularity is Near, Wingularity Theory holds that wingnut is conserved: it can neither be created nor destroyed, but tends to grow more dense (in both senses of the word) as the number of wingnuts diminishes. As KG puts it:

the insanity of the right (or at least those controlling the Republican Party) will continue to grow exponentially until it collapses into itself, creating the Wingularity, from which no sanity can escape.

One of the symptoms of the approaching Wingularity is the tendency for wingnuts to speak to each other in their own private code, which they understand (and which we, their liberal observers, perforce understand) but which the non-wingnut majority does not. I noticed this tendency myself a couple months back, which led me to come up with my own list of wingnut terminology. This list, which I have decided to formally dub the Lexicon of Crazy, requires continual updating, since the wingnuts are continually adding to their list of code words and phrases.

And so, with this blog post, I now formally add two more terms to the Lexicon of Crazy: empathy and Chrysler dealerships. As the wingnuts add more terms, I will continue to formally update the Lexicon of Crazy in posts like this one.

Sane or insane?

How do you tell the difference between sane conservatives and insane ones? You may be thinking it's a trick question, that there are no sane conservatives, but it turns out there are. John Cole, Lord of the Juice, cites the following post by Daniel Larison which includes the following sentence: "As we all know, income stagnation is something that most conservatives and Republicans have spent years pretending was not happening, because it did not fit in with the assumption that working- and middle-class Americans were thriving as part of the 'greatest story never told.' ”

So, having established that there are sane conservatives out there, how do we distinguish between them and the insane conservatives? A rough and ready guide is to note that insane conservatives are addicted to a series of words and phrases describing a parallel reality, while sane conservatives are not. Here is a sample list of these words and phrases. Remember, if you find any of these terms being used by a conservative, it's a sure sign of insanity:

ACORN
Fairness Doctrine
marsh mice
maglev train
birth certificate
porkulus
drill, baby, drill
Vince Foster
Islamofascism
liberal fascism
homosexual agenda
socialism

Just keep this list handy, and you'll be able to tell at a glance whether you're encountering an insane conservative.

(This has been a public service announcement by the Johnny Pez blog.)

UPDATE: Nemski at the Delaware Liberal blog (ah, the old home state) went and linked to this post and solicited more terms to add to the insane conservative terms list. Here's a few culled from the comments:

messiah
The One
abstinence-only
Bush was really a liberal/wasn't really a conservative
volcano monitoring
Democrat Party
class warfare
generational theft
wealth redistribution
liberal media
welfare queen
War on Christmas
feminazi
tea party

And I've come up with a few more of my own:

Christian nation
rapture ready
intelligent design
Long War
World War IV
appeasement
Neville Chamberlain
Community Reinvestment Act
country first
George Soros
Barney Frank
dijon/gray poupon
arugala
Teleprompter
empathy
Chrysler dealerships
Death panels
Euthanasia

If you can think of any more that we've missed, post them to the comments.