Saturday, August 27, 2011

FYI - What are 'red diaper babies', 'fellow travelers' and RINOs?

I carbon copy or bcc [blind carbon copy/don't display recipients] many emails to "red diaper babies", "fellow travelers", and to RINOs.  Below are some definitions of the terms from Wikipedia. -- rfh
RINO:  Being a member of the Republican party but not representing its conservative positions.  In the 1930s and 40s, "Me-too Republicans" described those who ran on a platform of agreeing with the Democratic Party, proclaiming only minor or moderating differences.
Red diaper baby describes a child of parents who were members of the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) or were close to the party or sympathetic to its aims. .. More generally, the phrase is sometimes used to refer to a child of any radical parent, regardless of that parent's past partisan affiliation (or the affiliation of the child).
     In their book Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro define red diaper babies as "children of CPUSA members, children of former CPUSA members, and children whose parents never became members of the CPUSA but were involved in political, cultural, or educational activities led or supported by the Party".
Fellow Traveler:

     The English-language phrase "fellow traveler" came into vogue in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s as a pejorative term for a sympathizer of Communism or particular Communist states, who was nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist party.
     In Masters of Deceit (1958), J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI, defined a "fellow traveler" as one of five types of dangerous subversives.[6] He believed any of them might promote the goal of a Communist overthrow of the United States government. The five types were:
  1. The card-carrying Communist, one who openly admits membership in the Communist party

  2. The underground Communist, one who hides his Communist party membership

  3. The Communist sympathizer, a potential Communist because of holding Communist views

  4. The fellow traveler, someone not a potential Communist or influential advocate for Communist views but who agrees with some of those views

  5. The dupe, a person who is obviously not a Communist or a potential Communist but whose views serve to enable Communists. Examples are a prominent religious leader calling for pacifism or a prominent jurist opposing red-baiting tactics on civil liberty grounds.

In Safire's Political Dictionary (1978), William Safire defined "fellow traveler" as "one who accepted most Communist doctrine, but was not a member of the Communist party; in current use, one who agrees with a philosophy or group but does not publicly work for it."
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_traveler