Jill Filipovic of Feministe asks a question that’s… starting to baffle me (emphasis mine.)

Congrats, “pro-life” Democrats, because you may have just handed the party a health care defeat — Republican strategists know it, and they’re practically giddy.

In the meantime, we have liberals commenting on a huge news website who are basically telling the little ladies to simmer down and wait our turn, because this is a battle best saved for another day. Newsflash to Lanny Davis: There was a 100% private funding requirement under the Capps Amendment — taxpayer dollars were segregated out from private monies. No public funding was going to be used to pay for abortions. And no, Bart Stupak and the Catholic Bishops were not satisfied.

She said it here.

‘Scuse me but this “liberals” business is getting a little bit annoying. Can anyone explain to me exactly what makes Lannie Davis a liberal? How about James Carville? Democrats, sure, but how exactly does that make them liberals? They heavily supported Hillary Clinton, and she’s supposed to be a liberal. And they support Nancy Pelosi and she’s supposed to be a liberal too. And sometimes support, I dunno, Emily’s List or sit on the boards of things like NARAL/Pro-Choice, though goodness knows where they were when the Stupak Amendment was being bandied about (not just last weekend but, oh, say, last June!)

Sorry gang. Lanny Davis isn’t a “liberal” Like Carville and Hillary Clinton he’s a partisan but conservative-to-centerist Democrat. Politico isn’t a “liberal” publication, it’s to the left of the Wall St. Journal and National Review, for instance, but it’s well to the right of even the not-particularly “liberal” New York Times.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but it wasn’t all that long ago that all manner of progressives unlinked DailyKOS for their insufficient enthusiasm for progressive issues. And “liberal doodliness.” (And meanwhile which site has been absolutely on fire with criticism and analysis of the failure that represents the fucking Stupak Amendment?)

But seriously, do they or anyone else you know and claim to loathe actually call themselves “liberal?” I dunno but I’m pretty sure they don’t.

Almost everyone who uses the term anymore, left and right, uses it as an epithet and (when combined with the term “dood”) the political equivalent of an ethnic slur. It’s used in the same way Orwell pointed out the term “fascist” was used after the War. It’s used in much the same way Holden Caulfield used the term “phony:” to mean someone you have contempt, dread, loathing, disgust, or impatience for, or distrust of. And it’s used, by the way, the same way right-wing anti-feminists and an extraordinary number of gender radicals use the term “feminist.”

In other words while everyone’s free as a bird to call each other “liberal” as often as they please, and wow it sure seems to please a lot of people to say it, it probably reveals more about them than it does about their intended targets.

The only people I know who with no hint of irony still call themselves liberal anymore are the kind of older (often much older) folks who also, if they’re women, occasionally still call themselves “women’s libbers” — because those are the terms they used in their Unitarian, Unity, and Congregationalist Churches back in 1968-1973. Anyway, anytime I hear someone say “liberal” like an insult I think about those people. I wish you’d pick another term.