an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials, Dec. 19-Jan. 4

assault weapons: gun-control talk. “Assault” is always to be in quotation marks, perhaps because guns don’t assault people, people do. See also “gun control”.

fracking: “the best way to fight carbon emissions”.

green energy: no less than a “re-engineering of the US energy system”; aka, “Obama’s repressed green id,” and a “shapeless concept” that is “stealing dollars from private investment”.

gun control. The wet dream of “the social service planners who can’t run health care, education, or public housing” (Dec. 25). A term to be used very sparingly (use “second-amendment rights” instead).  Gun control will not lessen violent massacres because they are primarily caused by too many “civil liberties” for the mentally disturbed. (Apparently, the individual rights mandate of the second amendment for gun owners does not apply to other groups).

industrial policy: federal subsidies for any industry the Journal doesn’t like, especially anything having to do with “green power”, aka, “taxpayer handout”. Subsidies for the oil, nuclear, coal and natural gas industries are of course not “industrial policy”, but, rather, the encouragement of “market forces”. Most other federal subsidies are “market-distorting follies,” “coddling” or “profiting from political agendas”.

Islamists: any foreign leader or country critical of American policy. Always characterized as “anti-democratic”. Synonymous with “Benghazi,” “ramming through” laws the Journal doesn’t like and “turmoil”.

judicial restraint: any position taken by the sons of Robert Bork. (see “originalism,” below)

originalism: The Republican myth of an “enduring Constitution”, complete and whole in itself, and not open to interpretation. A text without a context. As opposed to the “judicial left,” for whom the law is “whatever they say it is..the legal inventions of the moment”. They dusted this old chestnut off for their Dec. 19 homage to “The Great Robert Bork”.

productivity: limited to the “private, productive part of the economy,” the “small businesses, investors and the affluent” that Obama is inexplicably intent on destroying through his “redistributionist tax agenda”. (“Obama’s Tax Bill Comes Due,” 1-1-13).

profiting from political agendas: any Democratic policy, especially in regards to “green energy”. Republican political agendas that also enhance corporate profits–deregulation, lower taxes, weakening trade unions–is somehow immune to this charge.

regulatory binge: any new federal policy, law or mandate. Always “abusive”, “reckless”, “aggressive” and “punitive”.  Republican laws and regulations, on the other hand, are always “good governance”.

smear: a Democratic attack on a Republican.  In relation to Bork, “Democrats cast the first smear.”