"The last time Rush Limbaugh talked to an Hispanic woman, it was his maid getting him his drugs.

"And yet Rush and his ilk have come up with a name for the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court, a Supreme Court that has been 99 percent white men for 200 years; and that name is 'reverse racist.' She is a racist and someone has to stop her because for too long white men have been kept down by powerful Puerto Rican women."

Comedian Bill Maher delivered those lines last week on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" in discussing the Supreme Court nomination of federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor, and they were excerpted Sunday in a recap of the week's political jokes on ABC-TV's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos.

Maher's riff was a refreshing cut-to-the-chase about the tactic of using the word "racist" outside of its actual meaning, a calling-out that most of the journalists on the Sunday shows were unwilling or unable to do.

Thejournalists' response seemed to be simply to play soundbites of the accusations and have others comment.

On CNN's "State of the Union," for example, John King aired this passage from conservative talk-show host Limbaugh:

"So, here you have a racist. You might want to soften that and you might want to say a reverse racist. And the libs, of course, say that minorities cannot be racists because they don't have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone, because reverse racists certainly do have the power to implement their power. Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one."

The Sunday television talk shows — lacking any Latino guests or panelists, incidentally — gave viewers their fill of controversial quotes from Sotomayor, the first Latino nominee for the Supreme Court. Some, such as PBS' Gwen Ifill, appearing on "This Week," did point out that Sotomayor was being defined by her ethnicity in a way that white nominees never were.

But by and large, Republican guests were asked whether they agreed with Limbaugh and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich that Sotomayor was a racist, or with Pat Buchanan that she was an "affirmative action hire."

Democrats defended the federal judge as simply trying to explain that a Latina would bring a different life experience to the Supreme Court. Republicans countered that life experiences should have no bearing on a justice's opinions.

It wasn't until Monday on Washington's local "Kojo Nnamdi Show," it seemed, that someone seriously addressed the choice of language, rather than ask only whether one agreed with it.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, told WAMU-FM substitute host Rebecca Roberts that in the 1960s and '70s, "the right took over the language of the civil rights movement and treated them as if they were neutral words and had no context."

Thus, the attempt to give the words "color-blind," "racism," "empathy," "affirmative action" and even "civil rights" different meanings. "Reverse discrimination" was coined to assert an equivalence between efforts to address injustice with the injustice itself.

Nunberg wrote about this tactic in his colorfully titled 2006 book, "Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show."

"The art of political language is to alter and expand the meanings of symbols without letting on that the symbols retain their ability to stir feelings," he wrote. "Once a word acquires a purely symbolic power, it can be used to create an impression of similarity between two things that are actually very different in their natures, simply because they share a name. This is the process marketers exploit when they acquire once-lustrous brands like Lancia, Godiva, Fisher Stereo, or Ambercrombie and Fitch and attach them to downscale product lines in the hope that their connotations will persist . . .

"In recent years, the right's boldest use of this strategy has been in appropriating the language of the civil rights era. When that language first entered the received moral vocabulary, it signaled the triumph of liberal ideals of social justice in the face of conservative resistance and foot-dragging. Now the right has repurposed it to stoke resentments about race and religion, while liberals are left to thrash around for a new script," he continued.

". . . That's how conservatives have generally modified the rhetoric of the civil rights era, deploying it to defend the privileges of their strongest constituency, white male Americans."

That some of these appropriated phrases and changed meanings have seeped into the language is testament to the failure of journalists to keep the record straight. That shortcoming was on display again during the Sunday shows.

Arnold Garcia Jr., editorial page editor of the Austin American-Statesman, got it instantly. When Journal-isms asked him about the responsibility of the news media amid these covert language assaults, he wrote:

"My immediate reaction is that we in the media often let the sources hijack the dialogue. The criticism about bias — much overblown — has got the industry on the defensive and quite sensitive to any accusation of 'censorship.'

"Those of who live in dark skins and have felt racism's bite are amused — not impressed — when rich, privileged elites like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich squeal about 'reverse racism.' What's their point of reference? Watching a movie about it? What have they ever been denied on account of their race? Reporters don't think to ask that and they should ask when someone starts pounding the podium about 'reverse racists.' Does the speaker really know what he's talking about? Or is he just talking?"