We Have Met The Enemy ...

... and he is us!

As pointed out by TBogg and No More Mister Nice Blog, there appears to be what the latter calls the new "wingnut word of the year" -

Ex-Senator Rick Santorum is now taking a position at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-wing think tank, where he'll head a program called "America's Enemies"; the Santorum announcement comes just days after we learned that Sean Hannity's new weekly Fox News show will regularly highlight an "Enemy of the State." Now today we have Fox's Gretchen Carlson -- an anchor, not even a commentator -- calling Ted Kennedy a "hostile enemy" of the United States.

So "enemy" is the new wingnut word, a catch-all for terrorists, insurgents, fighters of the Iraqi civil war ... and Democrats.

I especially like the picture from the Hannity show, where they show the faces of the various "enemies" of the Hannitized (as provided by Newshounds) -

After seeing all the supporters of the Administration gleefully pointing out "enemies", they remind me of this classic version of a modern, technologically-driven propaganda machine -

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

From, of course, 1984. These people have become a self-parody.