moonbat
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From moon + bat, first used in the 1940s by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein,[1] then used in the term “barking moonbat” coined in 1999 by Perry de Havilland of “The Libertarian Samizdata”, a right-libertarian weblog. This originally referred to both left-wing and right-wing crazy people.[2] Sometimes wrongly claimed to be a corruption of Monbiot (from George Monbiot, British environmentalist and Guardian columnist).[3]
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]moonbat (plural moonbats)
- (informal, derogatory, politics) A liberal (someone with a left-wing ideology).
- 2005, Michele Malkin, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, Washington, DC: Regnery, →ISBN, page 108:
- So, what do moonbat professors do when they're not attacking military recruiters, the Bush administration, cameramen, and College Republicans?
- 2006 May 11, Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the Press Lay Down for the Bush White House, New York: Free Press, →ISBN, page 216:
- As nervous Bush supporters watched the president's approval rating slide, they unleashed their wrath on Sheehan, labeling the mourning mom a “crazy,” “anti-Semite,” “left-wing moonbat,” “crackpot” whose behavior bordered on “treasonous” and who was nothing more than a “hysterical noncombatant.”
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:moonbat.
Derived terms
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Robert A. Heinlein (1947 April 26) “Space Jockey”, in The Saturday Evening Post
- ^ Wingnut in the Word Detective
- ^ "barking moonbat" in the Samizdata glossary