Name-calling in the blogosphere

This post by Jill at Feministe, a follow-up to her previous post, was interesting to me. I've been annoyed by the liberal blogosphere's reliance on labels like "crazy" and "nutjob" for the rightwingers and pundits they disagree with, but for very different reasons. I just don't think it's as effective as it should be, and misses the point. People like Bill O'Reilly and Jill Stanek don't argue their oppressive positions because they're insane, they argue them because there are powerful organizations committed to the status quo eager to support them with both money and fame. Rightwing punditocracy is immensely profitable, even when the pundit is not directly profiting their corporate benefactor.

This thread, (found via this post) with substitute words was instructive, but the substitutions don't do it for me quite yet. The problem I'm having is that there is no effective shorthand for these accusations, and shorthand terms are very useful. The rightwingers we argue against certainly aren't going to start limiting their language out of concerns of privilege and exclusion, and bypassing complex truths has always worked in their favor, especially now if our internet-trained attention spans are shortening daily as I keep reading.

I'm going to be thinking about my own list of effective shorthand, and it begins with the words corrupt and liars.