anti-human: any environmental regulation, or policy mentioning such terms as “sustainability” or “environmental justice.”  An ultimate reductio ad absurdum, equating human well-being with employment statistics. Any use of the word “sustainability” is thus stigmatized as anti-human. (used interchangeably with “job-killing” as a modifier of environmental regulation.)

baby talk; all feminist blather about gender equality, glass ceilings, etc.

the federal maw: aka, Leviathan, the “bloated state,” the force that aims to “do away with individual liberty.”. Hyperbole, anyone?

bread and condoms: what the Tea Partiers say are all that matters to Obama supporters.

free trade:  as represented in the Trans Pacific Partnership, the new world economic order this treaty would enshrine is hardly free and has everything to do with corporate profit. By the same token, it hardly has to do with trade, and in commerce and tariffs, but has a lot to do with relaxed environmental, labor, and reporting standards. As Senator Bernie Sanders put it this week:

government power.  Typical Tea Partier statement: The Left wants this controversy (police shootings of unarmed suspects, inequality, racist remarks, etc.–fill in the blanks) to be about racism, but it is in fact about the nature of government power. Any race-related issue is always caused by government, and government is always part of the problem and not part of the solution because

The institutions and the people that we deputize to secure our liberty are — it is inevitable — the most significant threat to that liberty. This is evident at all levels of government.

preemptive capitulation: the Dems’ foreign policy doctrine. Any negotiation or strategic concession is always characterized as a “capitulation,” as if foreign policy is a zero-sum game in which we get everything or nothing

the proverbial “people”: any time the word “people” is put in fright quotes, you know it’s being mocked or belittled. In this case, not only is the very concept of populism dismissed as only “proverbial,” but so are  any claims Dems make to representing the powerless.

worth: as Robert Reich points out, the notion that people are “paid what they’re worth” is a “meritocratic tautology” because the political and legal institutions that define the market “rig” the market in favor of the rich, so the moral claim that people are paid “what they deserve” is based on an immoral market, and naively separates definitions and possibilities of “worth” from the realities of power. The “market” doesn’t speak; rather, it is a ventriloquist’s dummy, manipulated by Wall Street and the banks.