Dems and Dose UPDATED

It irritates the living daylights out of me when I hear a Republican--or ignorant TV type--say "Democrat Party" instead of Democratic Party. At the very minimum, one party's members ought to get the other party's name right instead of sneeringly misstating the name. UPDATE 9/14/: Coincidentally, Bill Walsh makes the same point , but better, on the same day.
Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker addresses the issue. Here's a part of it relevant to editors: In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. “Democrat Party” is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com, which blue-pencils Associated Press dispatches to de-“ic” references to the Party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. (The resulting impression that “Democrat Party” is O.K. with the A.P. is as phony as a North Korean travel brochure.) The respectable conservative journals of opinion sprinkle the phrase around their Web sites but go light on it in their print editions. (snip)