Political Correctness? Conservatives Invented It!

It's common for conservatives to bitch about "political correctness." In the debate last night, Megyn Kelly called Trump out:

You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,' " Ms. Kelly said during the debate, which set a cable record, with 24 million viewers tuning in. "How will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who [is] likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?”

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” Mr. Trump said, to some applause.

Then it got slightly ugly. “And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that,” Trump said.

As you can see from the highlighted section, Trump was not-so-subtly threatening to savage Kelly with the same sort of epithets he uses on other women if she didn't treat him with kid gloves. And, true to form, after the debate Trump whined like some fourth grader about what a meanie Kelly was:

“The questions to me were not nice,” Trump said. “I didn’t think they were appropriate.”

Trump especially took issue with Megyn Kelly, the Fox News host who began her first question to Trump by listing the derogatory remarks he’s made about women he doesn’t like.

“I think Megyn behaved very nasty to me,” he said.

Did she call him an egotistical, misogynistic, fat, old, balding, combed-over, narcissistic, smug, sociopathic liar and dick? No, even though all of those things are demonstrably true. She said nothing nasty or profane about Trump. She merely asked him to how he would respond when the vileness and insults that he and so many conservatives spew about women were quoted back to him. How dare she confront him with his own words!

Tellingly, Trump's first recourse, like so many conservatives of the Limbaugh ilk, was to hide behind the guise of speaking truth and being put down by "political correctness." Whenever these ... men blurt out the verbal diarrhea that is their misogyny, racism and homophobia, and people call them out for it, they defend themselves by claiming that they are the victims and that "politically correct feminazis and liberals" are trying to muzzle them.

Which is the height of hypocrisy, because conservatives invented political correctness. They don't call it that, of course. They gave it all sorts of dire-sounding names: blasphemy, sacrilege, heresy, miscegenation, profanity. In Trump's case it's different, obviously, because nothing is sacred to him except himself.

When teachers first taught evolution in the schools conservatives called it sacrilege and tried to muzzle them. More recently conservatives have literally forced political correctness on school curricula by rewriting history to edit out the crimes whites visited upon black and native Americans, and turning history books into Ronald Reagan hagiographies. When blacks demonstrated in the 1950s and 60s for civil rights, challenging the conservative notion that God had made the races separate with whites superior to blacks, conservatives sent cops and dogs to beat the protesters into submission. When blacks married whites conservatives called it blasphemy and miscegenation. When homosexuals marched in gay pride parades and demanded the right to marry the person they loved conservatives screamed blasphemy and claimed God sent hurricanes in retaliation.

Whenever their sacred cows are gored, conservatives are the first ones to whine about being attacked. When their tender notions of religion or sexuality or American exceptionalism (or Trump's ego) are challenged they act as if the trumpets of doom have sounded and the world will end at any moment.

The thing that conservatives call "political correctness" is just the Golden Rule: treat others as you would have others treat you. But that's a teaching they don't seem to have heard of.

If Trump is going to call women fat pigs and and Mexicans rapists he can't whine about "political correctness" when people call him what he's just demonstrated he is: a misogynist and a racist. Donnie boy, if you're going to dish it out, you have to take it -- you can't go whining to mommy that Megyn was being nasty to you by holding you to account for what you said.