While I find the double standards on which the Left routinely operates to be as nauseating as the next man, I must respectfully decline to be too irked by the harsh language of harsh politics.

Ultimately, conservatives who react vehemently to metaphor and overstatement are playing by the Left’s unlovely rules, implicitly accepting the preposterous notion that unreal hyperbole can lead to real violence, indulging in the routine censorship upon which progressives invariably insist, and, most crucially, aiding and abetting those who intend to make our discourse less diverse and more boring — people who have turned political language, as George Orwell predicted, into a form that “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” Civility is nice; originality, variation of expression, and good old-fashioned vim are nicer.

Maintaining that some terms are intrinsically unacceptable also contributes to the creation of an environment in which speaking the truth will be frowned upon. Despite the post–Joseph McCarthy reluctance to say as much, some people actually are “socialists” and some policies actually are “socialistic” — “communistic,” even. Our inability to say as much is problematic.