Post article never explains that "Democrat Party" is something only dummies and Republicans (same difference?) say. It grates because it is so fucking **dumb** and ungrammatical: Democrat is a noun, idiots!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012402469.html?nav=rss_politicsBush started the speech on a bipartisan note, honoring the first Madam Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and calling on the country to come together.
Then: "I congratulate the Democrat majority," he said, dropping the last two letters from "Democratic."
Bush does this a lot, and while it's hard to say if the omission was intentional in this instance, it is a semantic tactic that's been part of Republican warfare for decades. It's a little thing, a means of needling the opposition by purposefully mispronouncing its name, and of suggesting that the party on the left is not truly small-"d" democratic. The president's pronunciation was all the more striking because it was apparently not what Bush was supposed to say. The prepared speech that the White House distributed beforehand retained that precious "-ic."
The case of the missing suffix provoked an oh-no-he-di'int reaction from some Democrats. The bloggers caught it, of course. (Bloggers catch that sort of thing.) "Code word," wrote one. "Calculated insult," wrote another.
"We all noticed," says Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the liberal blogging site DailyKos.com, who replayed the president's opening words on his TiVo to make sure he'd heard what he thought he heard. "He just clearly couldn't help himself."