Moonbat
Moonbat (also "barking moonbat") is a term often used as a political epithet. Some Iraq War supporters use it to insult opponents like Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan. More generally, it is used as a pejorative for extremists, especially those who are perceived as conspiracy theorists.
The term was used in a newspaper hoax perpetrated by the New York Sun in 1835, claiming that a British scientist, Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, using a new fangled type of telescope, The Batscope had discovered a race of bat-type creatures living on the moon.[1]
According to an article by New York Times language maven William Safire, the term was first used by the famous science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in 1947; however, it was not used in the political sense discussed in this article. [2]
[edit] Current use
Open source advocate Eric Raymond used the term in an interview in The New Yorker to describe eccentric Wikipedia contributors.[3] The term has come into wider use in politics, sometimes as "moonbat crazy"; Boston commentator Howie Carr uses the term regularly.[4] In September, 2006, Carr ran a number of "How do you spot a moonbat?" segments on his daily radio show, and defined the term to mean "A left-wing nut who probably suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome."[citation needed]
The term came into popular use in blogs in February, 2004 with the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System blog in which blogger Allan Kelly humorously describes a moonbat as "a human whose cerebral cortex has turned to silly putty causing him or her to mentally slide down the evolutionary ladder to the level of a winged rat who is influenced by the moon and who wants to eat your brain. These creatures have broken brains and since the brain is the organ that tells us all when we're broken, their broken detection mechanism is unable to tell them that they are barking mad."
More generally, it is becoming a term to describe any political extremist, and like many epithets, it can be used to describe less extreme individuals as if they were extremists.
Moonbat (also "barking moonbat") is a term often used as a political epithet. Some Iraq War supporters use it to insult opponents like Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan. More generally, it is used as a pejorative for extremists, especially those who are perceived as conspiracy theorists.
The term was used in a newspaper hoax perpetrated by the New York Sun in 1835, claiming that a British scientist, Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, using a new fangled type of telescope, The Batscope had discovered a race of bat-type creatures living on the moon.[1]
According to an article by New York Times language maven William Safire, the term was first used by the famous science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in 1947; however, it was not used in the political sense discussed in this article. [2]
[edit] Current use
Open source advocate Eric Raymond used the term in an interview in The New Yorker to describe eccentric Wikipedia contributors.[3] The term has come into wider use in politics, sometimes as "moonbat crazy"; Boston commentator Howie Carr uses the term regularly.[4] In September, 2006, Carr ran a number of "How do you spot a moonbat?" segments on his daily radio show, and defined the term to mean "A left-wing nut who probably suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome."[citation needed]
The term came into popular use in blogs in February, 2004 with the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System blog in which blogger Allan Kelly humorously describes a moonbat as "a human whose cerebral cortex has turned to silly putty causing him or her to mentally slide down the evolutionary ladder to the level of a winged rat who is influenced by the moon and who wants to eat your brain. These creatures have broken brains and since the brain is the organ that tells us all when we're broken, their broken detection mechanism is unable to tell them that they are barking mad."
More generally, it is becoming a term to describe any political extremist, and like many epithets, it can be used to describe less extreme individuals as if they were extremists.
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