I Was Liberal Before Liberal Was Cool!

from Talking Point Memos

Over the weekend, Mark Leibovich had an interesting an entertaining piece in the Times on how "socialism" has become the Republicans' new all-purpose smear word attacking Obama in particular and Democrats generally.

Now, you can have a whole conversation about whether ramping marginal tax rates back to where they were in the go-go 1990s really constitutes socialism. But a different point occurred to me when I read the piece. I think this is probably the best evidence there is that the 'liberal' label simply doesn't have the punch that it had going back a good thirty years in American politics.

If it did, they'd still be using it, since it at least has some relationship to reality. But it doesn't, so they're not.

--Josh Marshall