Today’s liberty quote on politically correct speech:

“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”

Get enough of those “thou shall not say” words and phrases into the Lexicon of Forbidden Words, and it’s off to the races for fascists and other so-called liberals, who are dying to catch you in the act and/or take you to court.

As in (expletive) you, the man wrote, you gosh-darn (expletive).

Or: It’s wrong to call an African-American a (expletive) or a homosexual person a (expletive).

You may think this, but you can’t write it.  You can’t even deprecate the use of such words without tiptoeing through the minefields of liberal, now mainstream, orthodoxy.

Tom Roeser on conventional liberal advice to candidates, according to which :

the way to go is pro-abort, pro-gay rights (preferably gay marriage), hold on to the size of state government that exists now, agree to the “inevitability of income tax increases” and bow obsequies to the gifted leadership of the Madigans.

I will say this: it is definitely the authentic voice of 98% of those reporters in the mass media. You have a couple of beers with most newspaper and TV reporters and you’ll hear the same opinions . . . . Frankly, they’re the same observations reporters expressed to me years ago when I was a press secretary. No change since then.

Yes, yes, and double yes.  We Chi Daily News reporters and editors trooped into the Corona basement for ham off the bone the day after McGovern won the Dem nomination in ’72, grinning to beat all.

“You’re all happy your man won,” the grizzled Italiano basement cafeteria manager said, and he was right, of course. 

And that left-liberal tilting — let no man call it bias — endures to this day, among the very same people, except for the occasional maverick who whispers support for a fallen-away liberal like myself or the veteran police reporter regaling a reunion with tales of murder on the South Side (chuckles and smiles) but (uh-oh) quoting a psychologist he knew who theorized that black people just have shorter fuses.  (Groans and disapproving looks.)

Plus ça change, as Roeser says, though not in so many words.

Deeply flawed argument, old chap — D. Byrne in Chi Trib. As if Islamists would be impressed by our integrity (they would dance in their streets, taking credit and encouragement), as if there’s a move to slap a stop-work sign on otherwise-hallowed-ground mosque construction (have not heard of it), as if it’s not at this point a question of how dumb and/or rad-leftist is our president (I vote for both).

Anyhow, nice fulminating. Take that, you bad guys!

dropping the case.