Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Nov. 19-26, 2013

abject; mandatory intensifier for any Obama policy outcomes: abject failure, abject surrender, abject fraud.

feckless: trusty GOP catch-all descriptor for any Obama initiative; almost always used in the vicinity of its cousin-epithet, “weak”.

innovative: an inherent quality of any “pro-market” economic or political reform.

managerial liberalism: much worse than mere liberalism because of its Command and Control overtones. The rhetorical move here is to make a neutral term–like management–into an invidious one. Akin to using “trial lawyers” rather than just “lawyers”.

naked: much like “abject”, an intensifier used to magnify the painful effects of an Obama policy, as in a “naked power-grab”, or in the sentence, “Obamacare is a naked takeover of one-sixth of national economy”.

regulatory uncertainty: a kind of redundancy in the sense that all regulation–or, rather, the mere possibility of regulation–creates uncertainty. Oddly enough, in this tried-and-true rhetorical move, something “regular” is characterized as a source of radical instability.

serfdom: what Obama has put America on the road to, as explained by Friedrich von Hayek.

servility: what is leading America– suddenly a “servile nation”– to serfdom, under the spell of Obama the Charlatan, Obama the Liar.

sucker-punch: Obama’s devious and unscrupulous way of prevailing in foreign or domestic policy. Both the ACA and the Iran agreement are now routinely referred to as “sucker punches” to the trusting American public.

thinker: Paul Ryan. NOT Rick Perry.

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