The apology is to Tracy Wuster, whom I mistakenly maligned in an
earlier post by ascribing Mark Coburn's posting to her/him.  (I'm so
glad your name is gender ambiguous, Tracy. I don't know whether to
believe Fears or not about who you are, so I'll continue enjoying the
ambiguity. I've always hated the way the language forces us to
identify gender.  At least there are no pronouns designating race,
unless Dave Fears can suggest some.)  Anyway, Tracy was kind enough
to bring the error to my attention off list, and again, I apologize
to both Tracy and Mark for the confusion.  (no complexity, just
confusion.)

The addendum is to take advantage of Dave Fears' deployment of the
"political correctness" device, as unerringly forecast by Barry
Crimmins.  I happened to come upon Wikipedia's article on the phrase,
and highly recommend it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness Having been
brought up, myself, in the kind of ideological environment in which
the phrase was born...i.e., as a "red diaper baby" (see the article
for clarification),  I can personally attest to the origins and
transformations that are traced in the article, and am so glad there
is a concise source for that fascinating and convoluted history of
usage and abusage!  But in particular, I want to quote the article's
treatment of this latter day usage, to which Fears resorts.  I think
these brief paragraphs give an excellent account of the way the
phrase has been contrived  to "distract attention from substantive
debates over discrimination and unequal treatment based on race,
class, and gender"

As engineered term

Some commentators argue that the term "political correctness" was
engineered by American conservatives around 1980 as a way to reframe
political arguments in the United States. According to Hutton:

     "Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the
American Right developed in the mid-1980s as part of its demolition
of American liberalism....What the sharpest thinkers on the American
Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural
manifestations of liberalism - by levelling the charge of political
correctness against its exponents - they could discredit the whole
political project."[32]

Such commentators say that there never was a "Political Correctness
movement" in the United States, and that many who use the term are
attempting to distract attention from substantive debates over
discrimination and unequal treatment based on race, class, and gender
(Messer-Davidow 1993, 1994; Schultz 1993; Lauter 1995; Scatamburlo
1998; Glassner 1999). Similarly, Polly Toynbee has argued that "the
phrase is an empty rightwing smear designed only to elevate its
user".[33]

A similar objection to the discourse surrounding "political
correctness" is the claim that doctrinaire insistence on the use of
approved words is just as prevalent on the political right. In 2004,
then Australian Labor leader Mark Latham described conservative calls
for civility as "The New Political Correctness [2]. Similar comments
were made in relation to the decision to rename French fries as
Freedom Fries [3].

Ben