clipped from: mediamatters.org During its post-speech coverage of President Bush's State of the Union address on January 23, Fox News displayed an onscreen graphic that falsely claimed that, during the speech, Bush said: "I congratulate the Democratic majority" in Congress. In fact, while the prepared text of Bush's speech reportedly did feature the phrase, "Democratic majority," Bush actually congratulated what he called the "Democrat majority," as the White House's official transcript makes clear.
As Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, the use of "Democrat" as an adjective is a slur that originated with Republican operatives. Republicans consistently refer to the "Democrat Party," even though that is not what members of the Democratic Party call themselves, and use the noun "Democrat" as an adjective, which New Yorker magazine senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg identified as an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being "democratic," or as Hertzberg wrote, "to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation."