When words lose their meaning
By 
Maureen Dowd is of course about 23 years past her sell-by date, and it’s a sad commentary on the ethnographics of the Newspaper of Record that it continues to give her three columns per week on the nation’s most-read op-ed page.
Still, this morning’s column is a really disgraceful performance. The column is entitled “The Democrats Are Delighted. But a Coup is Still a Coup.” I’m aware columnists don’t normally write their own headlines, but this one is a fair summation of Dowd’s meanderings, carried out in her typical mean girl gossip mode:
A coterie of powerful Democrats maneuvered behind the scenes to push an incumbent president out of the race.
It wasn’t exactly “Julius Caesar” in Rehoboth Beach. But it was a tectonic shift and, of course, there were going to be serious reverberations. Even though it was the right thing to do, because Joe Biden was not going to be able to campaign, much less serve as president for another four years, in a fully vital way, it was a jaw-dropping putsch.
Putsch is just German for coup, which is short for coup d’etat, which is French for “a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government.” Of course the reason we have to resort to foreign languages for these things is that they don’t exist under the Anglo-American rule of law, which is why the goings-on all the way back in January of 2021 didn’t compromise an attempt coup or putsch, because if it did that might imply that The Wisdom of the Framers ™ might be somehow beginning to fail us in maintaining our exceptional exceptionalness.
How could Biden not be hurt that the Democratic convention went from four days of “sitting shiva,” as James Carville put it, to a joyful romp with Kamala atop the ticket?
Democrat after Democrat who had been close to Biden before conspiring to push him out had to confess to cable anchors that they had not been able to talk to the president, who was sulking in his tent.
Party leaders whitewashed the coup by ornately extolling Biden.
This is a minor point, but I wonder what percentage of readers of NYT op-eds know what “sitting shiva” means, although I suppose this thing doesn’t matter quite as much in the age of Google.
More substantively, it’s just wildly irresponsible to describe something that had exactly none of the characteristics of a coup as a coup. This is especially true given that Donald Trump, who did quite literally attempt a coup to remain in power (I really think a lot of Very Serious People remain incapable of focusing on that fact, despite is evident facticity) is in his typical projectile fashion calling a perfectly legal and ethically responsible bit of internal decision making by the leaders of a political party a “coup.”
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
Have another brownie Maureen.