an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, Aug 5-14, 2013

austerity: what’s good for the goose but not for the gander. Chicago School, Friedmanite “fiscal discipline” is just the thing for social benefits and domestic programs, but not so much for corporate profits.

interventions: always said to be wasteful, profligate or counter-productive if they happen on the spending side (as in the stimulus), but curiously never seen negatively when suggested for the cutting side (as in imposing austerity to theoretically reduce the budget deficit). Interventions on the cutting side do far more economic harm than interventions on the spending side.

managereal liberalism: when it’s no longer effective to label Obama as a “socialist,” this is Plan B. Part of the overall effort to make him out to be somehow unAmerican–different from the rest of us. (See “queer, alien and aloof”, below)

queer, alien and aloof: part of the continuing and ceaseless effort to make Obama “the Other”.