Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, July 29-Aug 7, 2014

burdening consumers: government regulation or legal tampering with free markets (see “the triumph of capitalism,” below). An unfettered free market is the consumers’ paradise, where prices are never fixed, all sales are up front and honest, products are never shoddy, and business needn’t worry about lawsuits or liability.

draconian: (see “executive edict”, below). Any Obama regulation or executive action.

executive edict: any Obama executive order–edicts are never a good thing, rhetorically speaking.

has no shame: Obama, giving away the store to “the takers”, Putin, and Muslim extremists.

misregulation: the only alternative to deregulation under Obama: all regulation is either misdirected or unwarranted.

prematurely naturalized and objectified facts: the free market, rational actors, absolute individual freedom, the tyranny of taxation and regulation, American exceptionalism

regulatory zeal: any Obama regulatory action–always over the top (see “misregulation,” above)

scandal goalie: Attorney General Eric Holder. Blocking all attempts to investigate Obama admin corruption and tyranny. Obama’s entire time in office is nothing but a serial list of scandals.

scarcity and tradeoffs: cornerstone rationales of free market dogma, deployed to defend inequality, economic development, deregulation, and the argument against any public assistance or social service. if economics is defined as resting on managing scarcity rather than creating expanded opportunity, and if inequality is the price we pay for prosperity, then so be it.

shiftless and inferior: the “takers”.

standing on principle: Obama’s folly. Rather than governing, he fantasizes about a lost Utopia that never was and pontificates.

the triumph of capitalism: the chimera of a regulation-free and taxless Ayn Rand America, much like “perfect socialism” was to the Soviet Union.

war on whites: the latest meme in the GOP’s reverse racism rhetorical contortionism. Like his so-called war on the wealthy (or “the makers”), if Obama is fighting this war on whites, he’s losing very badly, what with the stock market touching on all time highs and the net worth gap between whites and non-whites ever widening. (see above, ‘the triumph of capitalism”).

 

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