an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, May 17-27, 2013
accountable: what Obama’s “imperial”and “detached” Presidency isn’t, even though he’s been elected twice and has high favorability ratings.
an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, May 7-16, 2013
and don’t forget the four people who died in Benghazi: insert in almost any story about the IRS, the AP, Obamacare, Iran, Syria, etc. Now the rhetorical equivalent of adding “in bed” to the end of a fortune cookie message.
concerns are rising: passive voice and passive-aggressiveness combined in one opening rhetorical gambit.
Hamlet: Obama’s Syria dithering.
I don’t mean to be negative, but….: a typical Fox News correspondent’s rhetorical move after savaging Obama for a minute or so. This is usually a transition to even more savaging. Beyond passive aggressiveness. See also “concern is growing”.
overreach: any Obama administration initiative. Anything beyond a libertarian view of extremely limited government.
real facts: whatever the prevailing GOP meta-narrative is about any given issue of the day. These are always concealed by Obama, and whatever he says he can never “come clean,” both literally and symbolically.
scandal: anything the GOP finds questionable about the Obama administration. Benghazi, for example, is now always called a “scandal”, even though—like Whitewater—there is no apparent crime.
skills-based immigration: state of the artHeritage Foundation dog-whistle term for screening immigrants by projected productivity & IQ. For a devastating chronology of how this term -basically a eugenics-based argument-has evolved, see Charles Blow’s 5/9/13 NY Times column, “Terms of Art.”
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We are not only losing the war with enemies whose stated goal is our destruction we are led by a political party that constantly finds excuses not to take these enemies seriously and never has to account for its disgraceful conduct because its potential opposition is mute. The only way to reverse this trend is to mount a campaign to put Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood at the forefront of the political debate and to educate Americans about the real dangers we face. Americans need to become aware of the Islamic-supremacist threat of the malignant designs of the Muslim Brotherhood and of the disasters that may lie ahead because of the Obama administration’s policies of appeasing and enabling our enemies’ evil ambitions |
David Horowitz, “How Obama Betrayed America”, National Review. |
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And fourth, the free breakfast profoundly weakens young people’s character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably — even understandably — assume that the state will take care of you. And you will grow up also assuming — as do Europeans, who give far less to charity than Americans for this very reason — that the state will take care of your fellow citizens, including your own children. These are the ways in which the Left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts. Why, then, do progressives advocate it? Because it meets three essential characteristics of the left wing: It strengthens the state; it has governmental authority replace parental authority; and, perhaps most important, it makes progressives feel good about themselves. The overriding concern of the Left is not whether a program does good. It is whether it feels good. |
“No More Free Breakfasts,” National Review. The moral rot of the empire started with free breakfasts for poor children. The Left’s “destroy the children” campaign has been unmasked at last. |
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King said Obama ignores athletes such as former New York Jets backup quarterback Tim Tebow, who express their Christian faith, but was quick to call with his congratulations when former Washington Wizards player Jason Collins announced he is gay. “These are ways that the culture gets undermined, where it gets divided, and the people on this side take their followership from that kind of leadership,” King said. “And one notch at a time, one click at a time, American civilization, American culture, Western civilization, Western Judeo-Christendom are eroded.” |
“Obama Lowering American Values,” Steve King, R-Iowa, on the House floor. All it took was one gay NBA player to bring down Western Civilization.
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The result is a paradox. As the ambitions of government in the Obama era have expanded, respect for the institution of government has reached new lows. These scandals add another layer of cynicism. And the practical political effects are very real. Who is more likely this month than last to trust the federal government with the implementation of Obamacare (in part by the IRS), the enforcement of new gun-control laws or the securing of the southern border? |
“Government’s Heavy Hand Felt in AP, IRS Scandals,” Michael Gerson, Washington Post. Nothing like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Why trust the guv’ment with anything? This is the cynical nihilism at the heart of the GOP vision. |
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Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. |
“DC Turns on Obama,” Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, Politico. Oh, right, they’ve shown such bipartisan spirit and self-restraint blocking every Obama policy initiative, sabotaging budget negotiations at the last minute, holding up confirmations for months or even years, etc. Give me a break. Weather forecast: three and a half more years of non-stop hearings, leaks and cries for impeachment. The GOP is governing by negation. |
| Mr. Summers says governments should borrow more now at near-zero interest rates to invest in future growth. But this is what we were told in 2009-2010, when Mr. Summers was in the White House, and the $830 billion stimulus was used to finance not primarily roads or bridges but more unionized teachers, higher transfer payments, and green-energy projects that have since failed. Why will it be different this time? | It will only be different this time if the GOP stops blocking Obama’s call for more stimulus spending for roads and bridges. “Debt and Growth”, WSJ |
| Clearly, we need faith as a component, and its just silly to say otherwise. You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust…Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation | Penny Nance, CEO, Concerned Women For America.Bet you didn’t know that the Enlightenment led right to the Holocaust. |
| The legislation, being worked up by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), represents the latest-and bluntest-attack on NSF by congressional Republicans seeking to halt what they believe is frivolous and wasteful research being funded in the social sciences. Last month Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) successfully attached language to a 2013 spending bill that prohibits NSF from funding any political science research for the rest of the fiscal year unless its director certifies that it pertains to economic development or national security. Smith’s draft bill, called the “High Quality Research Act,” would apply similar language to NSF’s entire research portfolio across all the disciplines it supports. | “US Lawmaker Proposes New Criteria for Choosing NSF Grants,” Science.The end of the Enlightnment. |
| On Fox News last night Senator Lindsey Graham drew parallels between the Obama administration’s response to the Boston Marathon bombing and the 9/11 attacks in Benghazi, saying it “sounds like Susan Rice all over again.” “Right after Benghazi [they said] there’s no evidence of an al-Qaeda connection here,” Graham told Sean Hannity. Graham says the administration downplayed the idea of a “broader plot” in the Boston bombing and portrayed it as an isolated, “spontaneous” event. “The more you know about these two guys, they certainly didn’t learn all this in the bottom of their basement,” he added. “This administration doesn’t want to admit . . . bin Laden’s dead, but radical Islam’s on the rise.” Graham warned. “We need to up our game.” | “Graham Sees Similarities Between Boston and Benghazi,” National Review.
They see parallels between EVERYTHING and Benghazi. Call it BDS—Benghazi Derangement Syndrome. |
| This all fits what the TrueSpeak Institute’s Jim Guirard calls Obama’s “harm offensive.” The one-time chief of staff to Louisiana’s late Democratic senator Russell Long says, “Obama’s strategy, tactics, and constant modus operandi seem to be ‘First, do all possible harm’ to the public in managing the mandated spending limitations, and then blame the damage, the suffering, and — in the case of airline safety — the deadly danger on the Republicans.”… Obama is doing something diabolical: harming and endangering Americans so they will scream for more spending. Targeting the people this way confirms that Obama’s reign has little to do with good intentions and lots to do with swelling Washington’s budget and deepening its penetration in our lives. | “Sequester Cynicism,” National Review. Another impeachable offense that the American public are inexplicably overlooking. |
| As homosexuals come out of the closet, Christians go into it. “Authenticity” is highly prized in society today, provided that what one feels falls safely within the dictates of political correctness. Sports analyst Chris Broussard stepped briefly outside of the Christian closet on Monday and paid the price for it. “Personally I don’t believe that you can live an openly homosexual lifestyle or an openly premarital sex [lifestyle] between heterosexuals. If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, the Bible says you know them by their fruits, it says that’s a sin,” Broussard said on ESPN. “If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals, whatever it may be. I think that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ.” | “A Sportscaster Comes Out As A Christian,” The American Spectator. That’s right– middle-aged white, American male Christians are among the most oppressed. |
an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, April 20-27, 2013
blinking: any perceived Obama weakness or wavering. His two biggest recent “blinks” included chemical weapons in Syria and sequester-related FAA furloughs.
failed second term: Noonan and Krauthammer chime in on the same day that Obama’s second term is over—that Obama fatigue has set in. Never mind that Noonan has been saying this weekly for about three years.
harm offensive: any unpopular sequester-related cuts. The meme is that Obama “will even out the American public in physical danger to make cheap political points.”
permission structure: any GOP agreement to anything proposed by Obama. Permission is to be withheld at all times on all fronts. As Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) put it after the failure to pass a background check bill, “In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.”
productive investment: private sector investment. Any entitlement spending is considered an unproductive form of redistribution. A variation on the “makers vs. takers” meme.
restraint: government regulation. According to GOP fiscal orthodoxy, less restraint translates into faster growth, even though it was the lack of regulatory restraint that led to the financial meltdown and recession.
risk-taking: almost always paired with “restraint”. The logic again is that the more unfettered the “risk takers”, the faster the economy grows. With their panoply of subsidies, tax breaks & shelters, legal immunities, barriers to entry, and de-unionization legislation, the “risks” seem pretty well hedged these days.
terrifying: the current mandatory qualifier used with Obamacare.
union teachers: never just “teachers”.
Demonized thought crime
Lionized heroic framing
an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, April 20-27, 2013
assimilation:the first casualty of the Boston bombings. (See also “food stamp jihadists” and “the ethnic grievance lobby”).
character: (see also, “moral compass”). A trump-card virtue, considered to be exclusively possessed by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and, lately and astonishingly, Bush 43. Lacking this virtue, Obama is always merely “calculating” and bent upon his collectivist, totalitarian, redistributionist makeover of the United States.
entitlement culture: the source of all ills in America; the nation of “takers, not makers”; Food Stamp America. Evil spawn of earlier “moocher” memes such as “hippie” culture and myths of Negro laziness. Apparently, though, corporations are entitled to tax breaks, legal immunity, and subsidies.
the ethnic grievance lobby: along with Big Business and Big Labor, the main political force behind immigration reform.
food stamp jihadists: The Boston Massacre bombings are looking to be a trifecta for the GOP: immigrant-bashing, welfare bashing, and a renewed war of eternal vigilance against “terror”.
people control: the real aim of the “gun control” (aka, “gun grabbers”) crowd.
sequester scare strategy: any furloughs or budget cuts that are dire enough to nudge public opinion toward the Kenyan Pretender. The GOP always suggests alternative budget cuts, usually for ridiculous-sounding (but sound) research projects, office supplies, travel budgets, or Acorn (“community organizing”)-style funding. These alternatives are always referred as “smart spending”.
socialist degeneration, cycle of: creating a reduced, weakened private sector that can’t generate enough jobs to raise the working poor out of poverty.
Third World experience: part of the growing GOP Politiscript lexicon for Obamacare. (See also “train wreck” ). In this case, shorthand for FUBAR. The Republicans can never admit that any aspect of Obamacare is anything other than a catastrophic meltdown of the entire health care system and the inevitable result of government trying to do anything.
tolerance: liberals giving into sentiment about suspending civil liberties—no one is tolerant in a foxhole or when it comes to approving secret domestic wiretaps.
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As for due process, the greatest danger to liberty would be to allow more such attacks that would inspire an even greater public backlash against Muslims or free speech or worse. The anti-antiterror types on the left and GOP Senators who agree that the U.S. isn’t part of the battlefield are making the U.S. more vulnerable |
The greatest danger to liberty is to allow civil liberties? The greatest threat to Muslims is to not single them out for racial profiling? These kinds of Orwellian logic are Fascism 101. |
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For example: how is the War on Poverty going? We spent a trillion dollars on that, back when a trillion dollars was a lot of money for Uncle Sam. Actually, we’re spending almost a trillion dollars per year on means-tested federal and state welfare programs these days. Our reward for this is more poverty – poverty levels higher than they were in the late Sixties. Under the current definition, one in six Americans live in poverty… but even the definition of poverty is the subject of much debate, because it doesn’t include the enormous value of those War on Poverty welfare programs, which can leave an “impoverished” family with more disposable income than “middle class” families enjoy. Does this constitute success or failure for large-scale government welfare programs? If the objective of the War on Poverty was to reduce poverty, it must be judged one of the most astonishing failures in American history. Poverty won in a rout. On the other hand, if the objective was to make poverty more comfortable, by raising the standard of living for poor Americans, the war could be viewed as an impressive success. Most of the world’s poor live in conditions of awful deprivation; America’s poor wrestle with chronic obesity.
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Food-stamp recipients eat better than the middle class? Didn’t this government-by-anecdote approach ride into the sunset with Reagan? “Government Without Objective,” Red State |
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“This week, we have reason for great doubts in our culture’s ability to assimilate those who come here into good Americans, and our government’s ability to examine potential citizens and weed out those who would seek to harm us.” |
“The Boston Bombers and the Collapse of Assimilation,” Jim Geraghty, National Review. |
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“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right…Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.” (John Cornyn, July 2004) |
Lock up your female box turtles! |
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So does America’s Welfare System create Jihadists in a vacuum? No. But it certainly could engender the type of hatred and contempt for worthless humanity that makes it possible for a dehumanized and brutal egoist to be brainwashed into blowing up 8 Year-Old boys without the slightest lilt of remorse or regret. America’s Welfare system dehumanizes man. Dehumanized men are more likely to commit crime. The Russians certainly told us this was coming. After seven decades under Communist tyranny; they certainly were the ones who would know. |
“Does the US Welfare System Benefit Jihadists?,” Red State The logic here seems to be that taking food stamps “robs” you of your humanity and tips you toward becoming a terrorist.
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When a communist assassinated President Kennedy, somehow the American Right got the blame. Lyndon Johnson translated that myth into a campaign of slander against Barry Goldwater, casting him as a crypto-Nazi emissary of “hate.” After the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton saw fit to insinuate that Rush Limbaugh and his imitators were partly to blame….Occupy Wall Street was an idealistic expression of democratic protest, but the tea partiers are brownshirts in khakis…Barack Obama was friendly with a convicted domestic terrorist. But to even bring these things up, never mind invest them with significance, is considered outrageous guilt by association. And you know what? Maybe it is. But if that is outrageous, what do you call the paranoid style of liberal politics that has confused normalcy with fascism for more than half a century?
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“The Right’s Undeserved Stigma,” Jonah Goldberg, National Review
This is a tricky double move. It’s not paranoid to accuse Obama of masterminding a socialist takeover of America because the GOP occupies the high ground on “normalcy.” Paranoia is the new normal in Tea Party America. |
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the West has imported vast numbers of people who hate our guts and would love to slit our throats. Political correctness has replaced self-preservation. The Boston Marathon killer who set a bomb down right next to an eight-year-old child is only the latest in an ongoing series of such people. Today, virtually every group has its own “leaders” promoting its separate identity and different way of life, backed up by zealots for multiculturalism and bilingualism in the general population. The magic word “diversity” is repeated endlessly and insistently to banish concerns about the balkanization of America — and to banish examples provided by the tragic history of the Balkans. We are importing many foreigners who stay foreign, if not hostile. Blithely turning them into citizens by fiat, rather than because they have committed to the American way of life, is an irreversible decision that could easily turn out to be a dangerous gamble with the future of the whole society. What happened in Boston shows just one of those dangers.
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“Immigration Gambles,” Thomas Sowell, The National Review The Boston bombings prove that diversity, multiculturalism, bilingualism and tolerance are destroying the American way of life. |
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The problem created by the welfare state is thus not best understood as…the illusion of an impossible independence—an individualism so radical it renders all human relationships, including our relationships to the weakest and most needy of those around us, into non-binding optional arrangements, ignoring the realities of human life that make it necessary to guard human beings in their most vulnerable moments through an array of unchosen—or at the very least non-optional—obligations, especially in the family. The Left’s statist radical individualism that masquerades as a kind of communitarian collectivism pretends to offer a way for people to act together, but in practice it offers an escape from all mutual dependence and from the neediness of people who are not well positioned to pretend to be utterly autonomous.
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“More Than Dependency,” National Review Statism and radical individualism at the same time sounds like an oxymoron, but Republicans always seem able to square the circle by making something—in this case, communitarianism and welfare—into its opposite—in this case, radical individualism and social breakdown. A moral imperative is turned inside out and twisted into seeming like into an immoral disavowal of social obligation and community. |
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In just a short time, they would be entitled to the same massive array of government programs as everyone else, including expensive retirement income and health programs that are already severely underfunded. The average unlawful immigrant has a 10th grade education, and low-skill immigrants on average take more in government benefits than they pay in taxes at every stage of their lives. America’s families are already burdened with taxes to support a bloated welfare and overburdened entitlement system that is badly in need of reform. This situation would get far worse under amnesty.
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“American Families Cannot Afford the Cost of Amnesty,” Heritage Foundation Immigrant bashing personified. |
an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, April 12-19, 2013
angry: any expression of emotion from President Obama.
anti-antiterror: so-called media bias against racial profiling. In the wake of the Boston bombing, racial profiling is on the upsurge.
common sense: akin to natural law, human nature, or gravity, and bearing a surprising overlap with Tea Party position The DNA of instincts and values. (see “moral clarity.” Below).
the “do something” caucus: those intent on any form of gun control. The do-nothings carried the day.
“gun control”: always in fright quotes. Gun controllers= “gun grabbers”. Similar to “so-called “assault’ rifles”.
elitist: any Obama moral position, whether on gun control, immigration, climate change, etc. In GOP rhetoric, it is virtually impossible for Obama to take a moral stand on anything without appearing “insufferably condescending”, “superior-feeling” and engaging in “meddling and moralistic overreach”.
The Homeland: still a battlefield, thank God, thanks to the Boston bombers. Even though Dzhokar Tsarnaev is an American citizen, he does not deserve any Miranda rights
moral clarity: The missing gene in the DNA of Obama foreign policy. Moral clarity, on the other hand, is the key gene in the DNA of invasion, war and occupation.
moral relativism: the Boy Scouts yielding to the “homosexual agenda” by allowing gay members.
obsessives: anyone suggesting alternatives to carbon energy
train wreck: mandatory synonym for ObamaCare. The Tea Party faithful eagerly anticipate “the coming train wreck,” and will do everything they can to make it happen. ObamaCare is doomed to sink under its own regulatory obesity until it becomes a purely lean and mean “market-based approach”.
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In the 2000s, America tried to use a debt-fueled real-estate boom as a substitute for real wealth creation. The Fed’s loose money, government endorsement of private credit-ratings agencies and reckless promotion of homeownership created a housing bubble. The bursting of this bubble created a financial crisis. We do not want to repeat the experience |
Housing bubbles are only caused by federal regulatory laxity and easy Fed money, and not in any way linked to private sector greed and deception? |
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Another hallmark of the Bloomberg style is its insufferable condescension. One need only have heard the tiniest whine of a Bloomberg speech to know what I’m talking about. The preening attitude of superiority manifests itself in a form of moral blackmail. Adversaries of the Bloomberg-Obama agenda are not simply mistaken. There is, it is implied, something wrong with them personally. Opponents of superfluous gun regulations are viewed as accessories after the fact to the latest mass shooting. Opponents of an immigration amnesty are either racist or nativist or cruel. Skeptics of the relevance or efficacy of efforts to halt climate change are “denialists” similar to the cranks who say the Holocaust did not happen. “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence,” wrote Oscar Wilde. That is a fair description of American political discourse in the age of Bloomberg and Obama, when the rich and liberal exploit pity, shame, and guilt to further their agenda.
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Obama’s opponents are all either mass-murderer sympathizers, racists, or science denialists? |
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“If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted,” Rep. Steve Stockman (R-OK) |
The real philosophical question is how to do a background check on a fetus. |
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One of the dangerous inconsistencies of many, if not most, gun-control crusaders is that those who are most zealous to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens are often not nearly as concerned about keeping violent criminals behind bars. Leniency toward criminals has long been part of the pattern of gun-control zealots on both sides of the Atlantic. When the insatiable desire to crack down on law-abiding citizens with guns is combined with an attitude of leniency toward criminals, it can hardly be surprising when tighter gun-control laws are accompanied by rising rates of crime, including murders. |
“The Fact-Free Gun Control Crusade,” Thomas Sowell, National Review. Right, gun control advocates care more about the rights of prisoners than those of gun owners. |
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Anecdote, the age-old enemy of logic, now reigns supreme and trumps induction — as if the exception is always proof of the rule, as if the public will always forsake reason for emotion. Forget the statistics on Obamacare — my Uncle Joe was denied coverage after he lost his job. The economy is getting better, because my friend Will was offered a job today. Why enforce federal immigration law, when there is no nicer window washer than Herlinda, who comes to my house every Tuesday? It hailed in June here; therefore the world must be experiencing climate change. I would never shoot an AR-15, and therefore there is no need for anyone else to. My nephew is gay, and he’s a great guy; therefore gay marriage is great too. Sally yesterday lifted heavier weights than did three guys in the gym: Presto, female soldiers can do anything that male soldiers can. |
“1984 + 29,” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review reductio ad absurdum personified |
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Nobody knows what’s going on behind closed doors as the current bombing investigation continues, yet media scribes, foreign journalists, and social-media sideliners are convinced: The tackler is racist. Anyone who mentions the nationality of the tackled student is racist. Forget terrorism. RAAAAAAACISM is the real homeland-security threat to our nation. |
“America’s Empty Slogan: ‘See Something, Say Something’”, Michelle Malkin, National Review
Liberals believe that racism is a greater threat to the country than terrorism: this is how Malkin justifies racial profiling. |
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“We know that al Qaeda has camps with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border…We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanics when they’re radical Islamists. We know these things are happening, and it’s just insane to not protect ourselves and make sure that people come in — as most people do, they want the freedoms we have.” |
Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), on CSPAN |
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The feds may think $3 million is all you need after a lifetime of work, but that’s roughly the value of a California police sergeant’s pension if she works for 30 years, retires at age 50 and lives to normal life expectancy. Out in the private economy, people generally have to work longer than that before they retire, and some of them do manage to save significant amounts. We’re talking about people who work for decades and abstain from buying the bigger house or the new car so they can contribute the maximum to their 401(k)s or IRAs. The people who defer gratification and build a nest egg to avoid becoming a burden on their kids or their fellow taxpayers. The people whose savings finance productive enterprise. You know, the bad guys. |
$3 million is not enough to retire on? Obama wants to keep people dependent on the state via 401(k)s? |
Politiscripts, by Richard Roth 