This occurred to me. Of the many stains left across the internet by the current crop of neoconservative idiotarians - rubber-stamp obviousness and desperate cries for group hugs and attention being close-to-hand examples - surely one of the greasiest is the constant grousing about the scourge of "political correctness"; a complaint that plays as reliably well in the echo chamber as a frontman demanding if the arena is ready to rock.

Such staying power for a term unused outside the realm of parody since, oh, 1991? It's a drained cliché, malleable, as was its antonym long before Bill Maher smirked into view.

Yet the very same pious humourlessness, the very same shouting down of any opposing view, the very same presumptions of power, the very same claims to a higher purpose, the very same misappropriation of the suffering of strangers, that dogged the very worst of what we came to know as the "politically correct" is now the breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack of the neocons and pseudolibertarians, the Attack Runts and the designated mourners.

Whether it's the "patriotic correctness" (criticizing the president is unpatriotic!), the new "humanitarian correctness" (we're liberating the Iraqi people!), the sudden newfound sensitivity to anti-semitism, or whatever, the willingness of the Right to go on the attack whenever someone makes a slight verbal slip far surpasses even the most ridiculous caricatures of what "political correctness" ever was. Remember, the most extreme examples of PCness were limited to a few college campuses over a relatively short time span - it wasn't propogated and enforced by the media powers of the day.