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Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, Oct 25-29, 2013

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horror stories: any accounts of what is purportedly happening to people opposed to the ACA; almost always based on partial information, distortions of facts, lack of context, or outright lies.

mugging: what the government is doing to J.P. Morgan and the Bank of America, even though both banks continue to cover up bad subprime loans (or not carry them on their books), stonewall home owners wanting to re-finance, and claim that there was no systematic investment fraud during the financial/housing meltdown. Mugging is actually what any government regulation does to the “true market”. Also variously called a “shakedown”, “confiscation” or “ex post facto punishment”. Part of ther mythologizing cover story that “bad government policy: and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial meltdown.

political masters:  the puppeteers behind the vast Democratic redistributionist conspiracy. Obamacare is only the latest redistributionist scheme to expand government until it rules every aspect of Americans’ lives.

skyrocketing: as ubiquitious as “train wreck,”; use to describe ANY ACA premiums.

socializing: a near-cousin of “mugging”: what the government did when it bailed out the major banks at the height of the financial meltdown. In both instances, government action gets in the way of an unfettered “true market”.

sticker shock: whatever the premiums cost under the ACA–always more than people paid before, even for inferior coverage, “previous conditions” weeding out, lifetime caps, etc. Always comparing apples and oranges.

true market: an Eden-that-never-was, that Republicans continually nonetheless harken a return to. You know, the place where there is a price that satisfies everyone, where the market always clears in rational ways, where information is perfect and complete, and where there is no lobbying, price-rigging, weeding out expensive customers, monopolies,  or unnecessary procedures. In other words, in the current context of health care coverage in the US, pretty much the opposite of the status quo. Aka, “market forces”. The famous “invisible hand,” which is actually amazingly visible in terms of lobbying, political advertising, spin doctoring, and political advocacy.

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards, September 27-30 2013

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1. There’s a new front-runner for the gold medal in hyperbole surrounding the Financial Meltdown. In a recent Wall Street Journal posting, former AIG CEO Robert Benmosche compared the national outrage about AIG’s bonuses to the lynching of blacks in the South

The uproar over bonuses was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that-sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.

This is another triple dog-whistle, combining racism, class warfare, and martyrdom memes.

Matt Taiibi, Rolling Stone offers a particularly Twainian spin on this vile callousness.

Benmosche takes over the top spot in clueless hyperbole from Warren Buffet’s partner, Charlie Munger:

the billionaire vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., defended the U.S. financial-company rescues of 2008 and told students that people in economic distress should “suck it in and cope.”

“You should thank God” for bank bailouts, Munger said in a discussion at the University of Michigan on Sept. 14, according to a video posted on the Internet. “Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.”

Bloomberg, 9/20/2010

2. ObamaCare continues to generate alternative rhetorical universes, the latest of which is the stupendous GOP claim that:

This is a President who is eager to negotiate with dubiously elected Iranian mullahs but can’t abide compromise with duly elected leaders of Congress.

Wall Street Journal, 9/30/13

Another Journal editorial repeats the canard that, under the ACA, Americans will no longer be able too specialists, but will have to get wait-listed at dreaded “community hospitals”.

Obamacare Arrives, WSJ, 9/30/13

Yet a third counter-intuitive ACA claim comes from the National Review‘s Mark Steyn

In America, “insuring” against disaster now costs more than you’d pay in most countries for disaster….

followed by a launch into rhetorical hyperspace:

 Obamacare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you — to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers.

“Worse Is the New Normal

A further low point in GOP race-baiting came with the brilliantly -perverse rhetorical  double word score from a Republican state representative, conflating health care and racism:

In what may be the party’s lowest moment throughout this debacle, Republican state Rep. William O’Brien of New Hampshire said Obamacare is every bit as bad as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. President Obama naturally scoffed at the very idea, but O’Brien defended the analogy. “Just as the Fugitive Slave Act was an overreach by the federal government,” he told the Manchester Union Leader, “so too we understand that Obamacare is an assault on the rights of individuals.” That claim explains a lot about right-wing thinking, where callousness toward universal healthcare is exceeded only by ignorance of slavery.

Perhaps the phrase “just as” can be used as an incantation in Tea Party rhetoric, magically tying their own narrow political goals to universal values. But in the real world – the one informed by actual history and human experience – there is no meaningful similarity between slavery and health insurance (apart from the fact that both have been the subject of federal legislation). The very comparison is deeply insulting to human rights. Slavery was an evil system of unspeakable brutality, while national health insurance, at the very worst, involves a little bit of additional bureaucracy.

According to O’Brien, the Fugitive Slave Act violated states’ rights “to determine their policies as to slavery,” as though that was the greatest problem with the law. Completely missing from his tone-deaf analysis was any consideration of the impact on the fugitives themselves. Black people, not states, were the real victims of the Fugitive Slave Act

Salon, “GOP’s Most Shameful Shutdown Moment”

3. Over at Red State, the canard that Obama has “downsized” and diminished America continues in another key, again stigmatizing the poor by saying that they couldn’t even feed themselves without government help:

Current liberal theories say there’s no way America could possibly survive the hellish conditions of relatively modest government and broad economic liberty that existed just a few generations ago.  In fact, they tell us Obama’s America would die under the comparatively small government of Bill Clinton.  We are not the people we once were.  We’re weak and foolish.  We could not be trusted with the hammers and drills out Greatest Generation used to rebuild the world after the defeat of the Axis.  We can only be properly nourished and protected if the government spends far more money than it actually has, on a permanent basis.  A rapidly growing portion of the American population cannot even be trusted to feed itself without government assistance.  The number of important issues we’re even permitted to vote on is dwindling as quickly as the sphere of personal liberty.

If we didn’t buy all that hogwash, we could throw off the weight of Big Government, patch the leaky pipes of corruption, put a stop to absurd government waste, burn off the strangling vines of regulation, and restart the economy in fairly short order.  But we do buy it.  At least, a critical Dependency Class buys it enough to keep the Ruling Class in power.  This didn’t happen spontaneously.  Decline was pushed a few inches at a time, across the span of a century, until American confidence rotted away enough to let them push for feet instead of inches.  We were not willing to sacrifice our pride all at once.  It took a while to make us forget what we were once capable of.

We didn’t really get the government we deserved.  We got what we no longer had the strength to refuse.  We gave up what we no longer valued enough to defend.  And we didn’t pay enough attention to how the process was changing us.  The great remaining question is whether we can re-discover enough trust in one another to be great again. The Ruling Class is skeptical.

“We Get the Government We Submit To”, Red State.

http://www.redstate.com/2013/09/30/we-get-the-government-we-submit-to/

4. Hyperbole alert: In one of his classic end-of-the world jeremiads on the National Review website, Victor Davis Hanson claims that Obama calls his opponents “veritable” terrorists and Romney a “veritable ogre” (“veritable” used as a weasel word to soften the harshly hyperbolic nature of his claim):

In his political style, Obama seems to operate on the medieval concept of exemption. Through lofty spoken abstractions, he excuses low behavior. Praising “civility” allows you to call your opponents veritable terrorists; talk of unity means energizing supporters to get in their opponents’ face; advocacy of a campaign of principles reduces Romney to a veritable ogre. Plenty of presidents have proved vicious, but few so adept in attributing their own base behavior to others.

Not stopping there, Hanson goes on to counter-intuitively claim that that it’s Obama’s fault that America is more racially divided than ever, even though Obama has done everything he can to lower the racial temperature:

The result is that race relations have become more polarized than at any other time in the last 30 years. Under Obama’s leadership, celebrities, political analysts, and politicians traffic more in racial animus than at any other time in our recent history. Obama has had an uncanny ability to energize the Black Caucus to voice unusually inflammatory charges. How did it happen that suddenly Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx sound racially biased? When did the post-election commentary of pundits (e.g., “too old, too white, too male”) become so race-based?

As a cherry on top of this rhetorical sundae, he also uses the canard that buying guns is harder than ever:

There is no new restrictive legislation on firearms; and yet never has the ability to buy reasonably priced ammunition and firearms in quantity been more curtailed. In loudly threatening to enact more gun control after each publicized tragic shooting, the Obama administration has created a climate of fear, which has prompted hoarding, shortages, panic buying, and paranoia, which have accomplished what the federal government could not.

“Obama Transforming America,” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Glossary, mid-September, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, Sept 9-11, 2013

appeasement: whatever Obama does in the Middle East. He is always either said to be appeasing the jihadis, political tyrants such as Assad, the Russians or Iranians, or the “peacenik Left”.

boots on the ground (botg): one week a good thing, the next week political anathema. The “Surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan were a classic example of “good” botg policy, which the GOP supported until they didn’t. Obama’s threats to Syria were “bad” botg policy.

gaffe : Peggy Noonan’s and William Kristol’s  go-to characterization of any foreign policy initiatives or ideas coming from Obama or Kerry. It was a “gaffe” both  to threaten a military response to Syrian chemical weapons and to offer a diplomatic solution. When every possible response and its opposite fit into the definition of a term, that term may be said to be a Master Trope.

junior camel trainer: The Wall Street Journal’s latest casting of Obama as Putin’s and Assad’s lapdog. (“Obama Rescues Assad”). This meme deftly double-brands Obama as politically gullible and as an Arab. In other words, just an all-around embarrassment and outsider.

leadership vacuum: first cousin to the “gaffe” and “appeasement,” but also carrying its own connotation of fecklessness, harkening back to the derisive meme that obama was unfit for the Presidency and In Over His Head (IOHH). (See “besotted charismatic,” above).

self-besotted charismatic: Peggy Noonan’s latest Obama smear, referencing all of his supposed narcissism, preening, grandstanding, moral hyprocrisy and inflated sense of historical importance.

unserious: one of the master tropes in the narrative of Obama as hapless dupe and preening egomaniac. (aka, “feckless”, or “Jimmy Carter”).

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards, September 10-11, 2013

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1. Republicans are calling the possible diplomatic solution to the Syrian chemical weapons issues a “gaffe” at best and a hoodwinking by Putin and Assad at worst. In other words, they, as usual, are scripting an event as the opposite of what it really is. In this case, a peaceful solution is said to fatally weaken us and will only lead to our eventual destruction. Rather than acknowledging Kerry’s and Obama’s brilliant diplomatic move, they see it as the final disaster, and you have to wonder how long it will be until they start calling for a military incursion into Syria.

They even go all the way to Crazytown by claiming that Obama’s “gaffes” somehow justify the foreign policy positions of Bush and Romney:

But I’d bet that Bush and Romney aren’t actually laughing. That’s because they’re both serious men who understand international politics and who care for the future of the country. They no doubt understand that, as fun as it is to watch a political opponent twist in the wind due to his own ineptitude, the price will ultimately be paid not by Obama, but by the people of America.

Our diplomacy is a joke, our president is a laughing stock, our enemies are emboldened, and we’ve still got over three years of this to go. Nothing funny there at all, alas.

Glenn Reynolds, “Obama Is a Laughing Stock”, USA Today

2. Even though the Syria situation seems to be shifting every hour as a US military strike looks increasingly unlikely, the Tea Party wing of the GOP maintains their narrative that Obama is the worst US President ever and has completely bungled foreign affairs. Conrad Black pushes the “failed administration” meme further by comparing its disastrous effects to the fall of the Soviet Union. (Warning: hyperbole bomb about to be detonated):

Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and prior to that the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great Power as we are witnessing with the United States.

Collapse of American Influence Recalls Disintegration of Soviet Union, Fall of France

3. Over at Breitbart, Obama’s quest for a deal with Putin and Assad on weapons inspections is now being called “Obama’s Munich,” even though just last week the Obama administration was being savaged for pursuing a military rather than a diplomatic solution:

A mere five days ago, the Obama administration suggested that any UN investigation into the Syrian chemical attack was irrelevant. “The UN investigation will not affirm who used these chemical weapons,” Kerry said. “By the definition of their own mandate, the UN can’t tell us anything that we haven’t shared with you this afternoon or that we don’t already know.”

Now, however, Assad is reasonable, the UN is hunky dory, and Harry Reid has cancelled a planned Senate vote on action in Syria. The Obama administration’s diplomatic genius has somehow emerged victorious. All America left behind was its credibility and any semblance of coherent foreign policy.

Thanks to President Obama’s statements in August 2012 regarding a Syrian “red line” on chemical weapons use in Syria, the United States was faced with three choices in Syria: depose Assad; do nothing in order to prevent al Qaeda from taking over the country (likely the best option); or, as Kerry advocated, push for an “unbelievably small” action in order to reinforce America’s credibility. The third option was the worst. But in a truly awe-inspiring display of his foreign policy genius, President Obama has found a fourth option: appeasement, complete with international weapons inspections it rejected just a week ago. Welcome to Barack Obama’s Munich.

“Peace In Our Time: Obama Caves In to Putin, Assad, Iran”

4. You can’t make this stuff up: Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) now suggests that our former consulate in Benghazi is somehow linked to arming Syrian rebels:

A top congressional appropriator suggested on Monday evening that the State Department and CIA might have been stockpiling weapons for Syrian opposition fighters when they came under attack by jihadists in Benghazi, Libya.

“I firmly believe that whatever the State Department and CIA were doing in Benghazi had a direct connection to U.S. policy in Syria—a policy that to date has not been fully revealed to the American people or Congress,” Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.) said on Monday evening during a discussion focusing on “unanswered questions” surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed four Americans.

“Were these rebels being armed with weapons collected in Benghazi?” Wolf asked, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “Again, there is reason to believe this may be the case and a clear explanation is warranted.”

5. And if you’re going to play the Benghazi card, why not the race card as well? First, Rush Limbaugh called Obama’s Syrian policy “Operation Shuck and Jive”, and then Anne Coulter went on Fox News to call Obama “Putin’s monkey”.

6. Just after the Wall Street Journal called Obama a “junior camel trader” based on his speech on Syria, John Podhoretz, in the New York Post, went a wee bit over the top in villifying the speech:

“Thanks to Pres. Obama’s strength,” tweeted House Democratic honcho Nancy Pelosi, “we have a Russian proposal.” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein tweeted, “Kind of amazed I’m saying this, but the White House may really be about to win on Syria.”

Ah, yes, winning. Which is to say, being humiliated, acting weak, behaving in vacillatory fashion, making a mockery of your office, destroying your country’s credibility, making your own words look desperately foolish, and ceding foreign policy to the Machiavellian machinations of a gangster regime in Moscow.

That’s what you call “winning” when what you mean by “winning” is “losing.”

Jimmy Carter can rest easy now. There’s another Democratic president worse at foreign policy than he ever was.

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards, September 4, 2013

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1. The GOP, split over our next move in Syria, continues to produce some furious attempts at Politiscripting the moment. In this case, Eric Erickson of Red State manages a triple word score: likening Obama to a homeless schizophrenic, an “effete liberal ninnie”, and the destroyer of the US military. Thus “effete” makes its return to the rhetorical stage, having last been the main rhetorical battering ram of Spiro Agnew:

A strike now is nothing more than the President trying to salvage credibility he dithered away over several years of ignoring Syria to focus on Libya only to see it blow up in his face. Striking now in an act of war the President refuses to call an act of war and making it known that the act is designed to hurt, but not end, the Assad regime, is an effete response only a liberal ninny could come up with….This Administration’s foreign and military policies make all the sense of a homeless schizophrenic off his meds running down the Washington Mall. They make even less sense when coupled with Administration rhetoric on the sequestration making it impossible for the military to do anything with the military….Words mean things and this Administration has yet to seriously put honest words together to explain what it intends and desires.

2. From Tea Party LaLaLand, a Tennessee state representative manages an even more impressive rhetorical flourish, linking the potential bombing of Syria with every failed GOP attempt to “scandal”-monger:

Tennessee state representative Joe Carr (R.), who is mounting a tea-party challenge against incumbent Senator Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), also cited a lack of trust in explaining his opposition to military intervention. “This is an administration that has been cloaked in secrecy since [Obama’s] first inauguration,” he told National Review Online, before reeling off a list of administration scandals — NSA spying, IRS targeting, Fast and Furious, Benghazi. “We can’t get a straight answer out of the president. I don’t believe we’re getting accurate information out of the president now, and I don’t believe we should go to war because he drew an arbitrary red line.” The White House has yet to provide a compelling national-interest argument for intervention, which the vast majority of Tennesseans oppose, he added.

3. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) upped the ante even more with a truly-inspired piece of hyperbole, virtually calling Obama’s looming bombing of Syria a treasonous act, turning the US military into “Al Qaeda’s air force”:

“Nobody wants to see another Benghazi in Syria, and that’s really the fear, isn’t it?” Pags wondered.

“That’s exactly right,” Cruz agreed. “But there’s a broader problem. This administration, when it conducts foreign policy, it doesn’t do so based on U.S. national security interests… It appears what the president is pressing for is essentially protecting his public relations because he drew a red line, and essentially the bluff was called.”

“We’re not going to resolve the tensions over there and the last thing we ought to be doing is sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way to get into the middle of this sectarian civil war,” he added. “We should be focused on defending the United States of America.”

“That’s why young men and women sign up to join the military, not to — as you know — you know, serve as Al-Qaeda’s air force.”

4. The American Spectator also piles on, astonishingly linking a Syrian missile strike with abortion:

The justification for this war, from the vantage point of vital American interests, is nil. It makes about as much sense as Assad announcing that he will launch military strikes on the U.S. because Obama supports the killing of over a million unborn babies a year.

It is sad to see Republicans like Boehner join in this phony harrumphing about evil abroad. Fix your own country. Address America’s moral evils. Pols who can’t stop chemical abortions in America won’t stop chemical bombing in Syria.

5.  In a classic “they don’t know what’s good for them” moment, Richard Epstein of the libertarian Hoover Institute ridicules the “living wage” campaign of Bill de Blasio in NYC. After all, Epstein modestly proposes, who ever said that a person’s wages should amount to “anything they can live on”?

What is characteristic about these and other similar attempts is how little effort they make to understand anything about the underlying principle. For example, de Blasio’s stunt makes it appear that the test of a good minimum wage law is whether people can live on that salary. In so doing, he ignores all the non-pecuniary benefits that a job can give people: exposure to business, professional skills, networking, and the like. College seniors are eagerly seeking unpaid internships to gain experience in the work force. Why deny that opportunity to those from less privileged backgrounds who must contend with unemployment rates of 41.6 percent in the case of black teenagers aged 16 to 19?

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims, and Canards, August 28, 2013

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1. Assuming that the best defense is to be as offensive as possible, Bill O’Reilly is spearheading the counter-intuitive meme that Dr. King would be ashamed of all black people in America, 2013, who are nothing more than a pack of welfare queens, whores and drug addicts who are too lazy or government-dependent to ever assume any initiative or personal responsibility:

As the United States approaches the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, many are taking the time to reflect on how far the nation has come. In his Talking Points Memo tonight, Bill O’Reilly speculated what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would think of the racial situation in America today
.

“If Dr. King were alive today, I believe he would be brokenhearted about what has happened to the traditional family, and not only among blacks.”

O’Reilly speculated that Dr. King would not be pleased with the out-of-wedlock birth rate, the broken education system and the rap industry. “Would he approve the Civil Rights Movement that continues to blame American society for the problems encountered by blacks rather than encouraging personal responsibility as a way to achieve individual success?”

The Factor host criticized Saturday’s march in Washington D.C. for being “heavy on grievance” and “light on problem solving.”

O’Reilly slammed Al Sharpton’s National Action Network for financially profiting off of the event.

Fox news summary of the O’Reilly Factor, August 26, 2013: “Dr. Kinf Would Be Broken-Hearted at Breakdown of Traditional Family in America”.

2. The National Review editors echo this patronizing “blame the victim” meme. Again, blacks are equated with felons, addicts, government junkies, whores, and irresponsible layabouts and deadbeat dads, as the GOP ludicrously tries to seize the high moral ground on racial justice:

Another mark is the decrepitude of today’s civil-rights movement. The evils the movement fought — state-sponsored segregation, pervasive racial discrimination — have been vanquished. In their place are evils that are, alas, less amenable to marches. And so King’s heirs flail about. Where he spoke of a “bank of justice,” they just trade in grievances. Today Al Sharpton, whose chief political success has been to foment enough racial hatred to yield arson and murder, can present himself as a civil-rights leader without much fear of contradiction. We will have to look elsewhere for answers to the evils that now afflict Americans, and especially blacks: lousy schools, a thriving drug trade and a misguided governmental response, the collapse of marriage.

3. Allen West takes the blame-the-victim meme further into the Right’s twisted racial psyche by calling blacks “baby killers” who don’t care about their children’s education, with the added trademark Allen West loonytune that black abortions have robbed America of “the next generation of “prominent entertainers and sports figures”:

We are witnessing the complete breakdown and collapse of what was the foundational strength of the black community, the family. Today, 72 percent of black children are born out of wedlock … that is not part of the dream.
It is, however, the result of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Dr. King talked about the promissory note of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the guarantee of unalienable rights: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. When it comes to life, over the past two score years there have been some 13 million black babies aborted. The black community would be 36 percent greater save for this tragedy, this genocide.
How many black babies will never experience King’s dream, the American dream? How many will never get to be the next generation of doctors, lawyers, successful business men and women, prominent entertainers and sports figures. This horror is not part of Dr. King’s dream.
The hypocrisy is that liberal progressive Democrats support the choice of a woman to kill black babies but reject the choice of the same woman, or parents, to seek a quality education for black children. President Obama ended Washington, D.C.’s,  school voucher program in 2009, yet his progeny attend the elite Sidwell Friends, and now the Obama DOJ is going after Louisiana for its school voucher program.

4. On Syria, the Right seems divided between neocon warhawks and doves, the latter arguing against any American intervention not on principle but on the hysterical assertion that any attack on Syria would be on behalf of “our new Al Qaedia allies”:

Cannibalism is fine. Massacres are fine. Ethnic is cleansing is fine. All so long as they are done by our new al Qaeda allies.

It is hard to believe that the power of the United States and what remains of its shredded national honor after four years of Obama is going to be yoked to the cause of aiding al Qaeda dominated rebels. Again.

Red State, “Ethnic Cleansing Begins in Syria”

5. Finally, today, some lovely pure crazy from Louis Gohmert (R-TX) Land:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Monday said that it was a “scary thought” that elites could be culling the population with vaccines to preserve the Earth’s resources.

The Texas Republican spent part of his five-week break from Congress this week by interviewing conservative activist Alan Keyes while filling in as a guest host for Tony Perkins on Family Research Council’s Washington Watch.

Gohmert pointed out that some liberals believed that the Earth was already over populated.

“A lot of people who fancy themselves elites, right, because they’ve made a lot of money, they’re names are all over the media and so forth, they’ve really signed on to an agenda that requires the depopulation of the globe,” Keyes explained. “And in the name of fighting global climatological change, called global warming — that’s proven to be something that’s wrong — they are saying that we’ve got to cut back the population of the world.”

“Bill Gates gave a famous talk back in 2009, which he was talking about actually abusing vaccinations, which are supposed to keep people healthy and alive, and saying how this could lead to a 15 percent reduction in the population of the globe as a way to achieve this result,” he continued.

Keyes warned that elites had a plan to reduce the number of people in the world to 700 million “by culling the population.”

“They’re preaching that doctrine because they actually believe we’re a blight on the face of the planet, we human beings,” Keyes said. “And we should, therefore, be put on a path toward our own semi-extinction. I often try to get people to see that if you think about it, if we actually get back to the levels they’re talking about, it would just be these elitists and the people needed to service them. That’s all that will be left in the world.”

“That’s a scary thought,” Gohmert agreed.

Glossary, August 15-28, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, Aug 15-28, 2013

colorblind: aka, “race neutrality”. Race is like Voldemort: He whose name cannot be mentioned. Somehow, in yet another example of GOP magical thinking, taking racism off the table as a subject suddenly makes it go away. Or, worse, they seem to be patronizing blacks and ludicrously seizing the high moral ground on racial justice. Since everone is now “colorblind,” racists have disappeared, but, somehow, racism hasn’t,

diversocrats: entrenched defenders of racial equality, equal opportunity, and affirmative action. A sneering nickname for Democrats.

evidence: In the case of a longed-for Obama impeachment, the crazy thing that Obama’s defenders are calling for. In this case, evidence is a Democratic ploy.

grievances: all calls for equal justice, civil rights, voting rights, etc. All such claims are usually linked to Al Sharpton, a man who “foments arson and murder”. Somehow, there is no longer a correlation between rights and justice because justice has been served and we are now in a “colorblind” society.

gun-grabber: anyone supporting even criminal background checks for gun licenses. Obviously someone kowtowing to “New York anti-gun” interests.

national self-abasement: the sum total of Obama’s appeasement-based foreign policy, the only outcome of which is American irrelevance and humiliation.

negative rights/negative liberty: the originalist interpretation of the Bill of Rights, claiming that the guiding vision and promise of America’s founders was to limit or kill off government. The alternative is  positive liberyt or rights–a “European style cradle-to-grave democracy” that promises the people a free lunch.

sycophant media: any media outlet that reports White House statements and policies without sneering derision.

utopian interventionism: anything we do to intervene in Syria on humanitarian grounds.

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims, and Canards, August 26, 2013

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1. GOP Racism on steroids showcased in this blogpost from MJ Media, linked to via the National Review website. This irony-gone-terribly-wrong post manages to link minorities with alcoholics, manual laborers, felons, profligates, law-breakers, and deadbeat dads:

There’s nothing wrong with making excuses for bad, self-destructive behavior. That might be called “enabling” in some other context, but not here. It’s not really the criminal’s fault, after all. Conservatives just don’t know how hard it is and how the world is mistreating people of color. When you see an alcoholic who is down and out, it’s just common decency to buy him a drink.

When Dr. King said that he hoped for a day when his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, he meant precisely that: That racial preferences are a good idea, and that telling someone that they can’t have a job or vote because of some silly felony conviction is terribly, terribly wrong.

And it’s not just crime that is no big deal. Why should employers be able to get away with telling people that they have to pass some kind of firefighting test before they can become firefighters? Why should bankers care if someone is likely to repay a loan before deciding whether to make a loan at a particular interest rate? In our schools, isn’t it more important that all racial and ethnic groups be disciplined at the same rates than that there actually be school discipline? And why encourage immigrants to learn English when everyone knows that not knowing English is no impediment to a rewarding and successful career as a ditch digger?

People of color are much, much better off if they are not encouraged to study hard, live within their means, follow the rules, and otherwise “act white.” Acting white is, after all, for white people, and conservatives should not insist on such undiverse behavior for anyone else. In the long run, if folks in a particular group are not meeting some standard, it is better for them if we get rid of the standard than if we encourage them to meet it. After all, too, too many people of color won’t.

What’s worse, the fact is that it is much harder to raise children who do well in school and stay out of trouble with the law and have a lot of “values” in a home without a father. Now, given the choice between getting rid of these trifling and unrealistic standards, on the one hand, versus embracing an inspiring diversity of childrearing possibilities, on the other, isn’t it obvious that we should be nonjudgmental?

Fess Up, Conservatives: Time to Accept Blame for MLK’s Unrealized Dream

2. It’s shaping up as a big week for GOP racism, pegged to the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. They aren’t even hiding it anymore, as exemplified by this perfect counter-intuitive National Review piece that argues that affirmative action and racial preferences always actually only  hurt minorities’ educational attainment

But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/356718/devastating-affirmative-action-failure-heather-mac-donald

3. Not to be outdone on the race-baiting front, George Will plays the ancient, discredited and counter-intuitive non-sequitur card that single mothers are to blame for racial inequality, conservative columnist George Will asserted on Sunday that single mothers actually presented a bigger threat to minority communities than a lack of voting rights.

During a segment on ABC’s This Week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington for civil rights, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile noted that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would still be marching today if he were alive.

“Marching to raise the minimum wage, to ensure that workers could organize,” she said. “He would be marching for the same values that he marched for 50 years ago.”

ABC’s Cokie Roberts said that the progress made in the last 50 years was why the voting restrictions being passed by Republican-controlled legislatures around the country were “downright evil.”

Will, however, pointed to a report published by Daniel Patrick Moynihan eight months after the march that said there was crisis in the African-American community “because 24 percent of African-American children are being born to unmarried women.”

“Today, it’s tripled, 72 percent,” Will added. “And that, not an absence of rights is surely the biggest impediment.”

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/george-will-single-moms-more-dangerous-minor

4. Obamacare Derangement Syndrome continues, in this nice little bit of hyperbole from Mark Steyn in the National Review:

It requires a perverse genius to construct a “health” “care” “reform” that destroys everything from religious liberty to full-time employment, while requiring multitudes of new tax collectors and other bureaucrats and ever fewer doctors and nurses. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356634/obamacares-hierarchy-privilege-mark-steyn/page/0/1

5. Tomorrow marks the  onset of the media blitz for Obama’s impeachment, spearheaded by Aaron Klein’s # 1 Amazon bestseller, Impeachable Offenses: The Case For Removing Barack Obama From Office. This grasping-at-straws, ragtag collection of trial balloons that went nowhere include the following “high crimes and misdemeanors”, which, collectively, resemble a garage sale of discredited ideas:

·                  Obamacare not only is unconstitutional but illegally bypasses Congress, infringes on states’ rights and marking an unprecedented and unauthorized expansion of IRS power.

·                  Sidestepping Congress, Obama already has granted largely unreported de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens using illicit interagency directives and executive orders.

·                  The Obama administration recklessly endangered the public by releasing from prison criminal illegal aliens at a rate far beyond what is publicly known.

·                  The president’s personal role in the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack, with new evidence regarding what was transpiring at the U.S. mission prior to the assault – arguably impeachable activities in and of themselves.

·                  Illicit edicts on gun control in addition to the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation intended, the book shows, to collect fraudulent gun data.

·                  From “fusion centers” to data mining to drones to alarming Department of Homeland Security power grabs, how U.S. citizens are fast arriving at the stage of living under a virtual surveillance regime.

·                  New evidence of rank corruption, cronyism and impeachable offenses related to Obama’s first-term “green” funding adventures.

·                  The illegality of leading a U.S.-NATO military campaign without congressional approval.

·                  Obama has weakened America both domestically and abroad by emboldening enemies, tacitly supporting a Muslim Brotherhood revolution, spurning allies and minimizing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/impeachment-author-on-fox-news-savage/#CQEevcHPTttkTZaP.99 

 

Glossary, mid-August, 2014

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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”.

Glossary, late July, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, July 17, 2013-July 31, 2013:

adults: GOP voters. The GOP didn’t lose the last election because of their policies, but because not enough adults turned out to vote. Non-adults of course included Hispanics and Blacks, who were all “propagandized” to vote Dem.

the national leader model: Obama’s authoritarian master plan to create himself as a kind of new Mussolini, controlling all government policy, sidestepping Congress altogether. He’s always either a feckless leader or too forceful an autocrat.

Obamacore: GOP caricature of high core standards enshrined in the new national core curriculum. Yet another Obama policy only to be treated with contempt and ridicule: better student learning.

parasites: (aka, pillagers). Pensioners (especially the public service and union workers who “brought down” Detroit), food stamp recipients, unemployment benefit recipients, Medicaid recipients, etc. Never, ever corporations receiving huge tax breaks and subsidies.

the political class: Democrats in public office or lobbying; union “bosses”, liberal media pundits. A permanent layer of parasites in Washington and big cities. Never, ever Republicans.

the race card: whenever the GOP calls something “race baiting” or “playing the race card,” or “racially-charged,” they really just are justifying their own callous and calculated racism. As with Trayvon, they blame the victim for the crime.

responsibility (aka, “human agency”): what “parasites” lack, and what defines “adults”.

tolerance: what the GOP promises they are NOT practicing when it comes to gay rights.

union greed: a redundancy; the main driver of Detroit’s downfall.  Pensioners as the ultimate job-killers. Of course, corporate greed is never mentioned.