Category Archives: emerging memes

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, July 23-28, 2014

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albatross: a “taker”; anyone getting any social safety net support. (See also “deadbeats,” below.)

altruism: liberal innocence and idealism; well-meaning but clueless responses to political issues. Also represented as a cover for Dem hypocrisy and corruption. Always used as a smear.

cocktail-hour convictions: another sneering characterization of Dem idealism and cant. A clever, catch-all phrase insofar as it encapsulates Dem elitism, hypocrisy, self-indulgence, and lack of any core moral beliefs.

contracts: part of Paul Ryan’s paternalistic “opportunity grants”; a new level of government monitoring of anyone receiving any form of public assistance.

craven: any Obama foreign policy response short of either armed invasion or massive supplies of weapons. (See “dithering” , below.)

deadbeat: anyone on any form of government financial assistance. The takers.

dithering: any Obama foreign policy response short of either armed invasion or massive supplies of weapons. (See “craven” above)

drive-by shooting: any regulatory or judicial policy or decision opposed by the Tea Party.

low-information voters:  Condescending dismissal of Obama supporters in 2008 & 2012. Easily swayed by race-baiting and promises of handouts. After all, anyone with enough information would vote GOP.

magnet:  Obama’s masterplan to grant blanket amnesty to Central American refugees, thus creating a whole new generation of Dem voters.

opportunity grants: formerly known as block grants. Part of Paul Ryan’s plan to give the states the power to shrink public assistance to a drip

the Party of Ideas: the GOP. Principled, selfless, and objective. Dems, by comparison, are amoral, self-serving and selfish.

prosecutorial zeal: the root cause of any indictment of a GOP political official or a corporate executive.

a real President: what the US has lacked since 2009.  GOP commentators have never accepted Obama as a legitimate president.

root causes. Getting behind Dem hypocrisy to the basics. For example, the “root causes” of poverty are laziness, fraud, and promiscuity.

self-sufficiency: what the poor are accused of never “reaching” or even aspiring toward.

sexual moralism: liberal political correctness on any issues related to rape, birth control, or sexual harrassment. Moralism is not the same as morality, since the Dems are inherently amoral or immoral.

 

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, July 14-July 23, 2014

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bad actors: the international “thugs” who run circles around Obama, in all his “lassitude.” (see below). An absolute duality between the white hats (our allies) and the black hats (everyone else).

comprehensive tax reform: tax cuts for the wealthy and for businesses.

dynamism: what will get “unleashed” (see below) once Obama is sent back to Kenya. In Tea Party parlance, the opposite of “cronyism.”

factotum: any Dem political appointee or administration official or spokesperson.

lassitude: anything short of an armed, unilateral, interventionist American response to foreign conflicts.

The Obama matrix: supposedly the never-never land of smug complacency and self-righteousness that all Dems have fallen into.

patient-centered health care: euphemism for insurance company-centered health care. The core of this rhetoric are vouchers, which of course will never go far enough to cover anything. Naturalizes the voucher approach as consumer choice, whereas it will really amount to very limited choices, defined by the insurance-health care-Big Pharm complex.

simplified tax code: flat tax.

streamlining: euphemism for gutting environmental laws that lead to increased construction costs.

trampled rights: the result of any laws, regulations or policies the Tea Party opposes. By definition, any “natural right” to do as you please is “trampled” by “red tape”.

unleash: the glorious liberation of American “dynamism” that will result from “streamlined” regulations, “comprehensive tax reform” and “market forces” . What Keystone will do for oil, deregulation for the finance and banking industries, and relaxation of environmental laws for the Koch brothers.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, June 29-July 6, 2014

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climateers: aka, “the climate mafia”. Supporters of the “theory” of climate change. This term infantilizes them, as if they are leading a children’s crusade.

cronyism: the moral impetus behind all Dem  political appointees.

crowd: a devaluing term for any large-scale social or political consensus that the GOP resists. See above,”climateers”. Mocking the elitist idea of “the in crowd,” this meme reinforces the master narrative meme of Obama as elitist. Often used whenever anyone proposed corporate or Wall Street regulation as the “anti-business crowd.”

good business climate: low or no taxes and regulations.

government seizure: taxes and regulations.

green pork: Any spending on alternative energy solutions or proposals. Solyndra.

humorless: the moral scolds inside the White House and Senate. They can also, however, be portrayed as putting on a “moral minstrel show” (see below), so they are at least sometimes entertaining.

minimalist:what Obama is being accused of being (along with detached, disembodied, fatalistic and passive)–that is when  he isn’t being accused of engineering a socialist takeover of health care, a federally-controlled government run by progressives, and a master foreign policy plan to give way to Muslims.

moral minstrel show: the GOP’s racist characterization of Dem social justice advocacy.

politicized indignation: yet another characterization of the use of the “victim card” by women and minorities. A scurrilous  euphemism for moral blackmail.

the ordinary citizen: similar to Nixon’s putative “moral majority,” the idealized common-sense citizens the GOP claims as their own. The same pesky voters who elected Obama twice, however.

raving: Obama on the stump, now likened to Lear on the heath.

tax reform: tax reduction, inevitably the only way to hope, growth and opportunity.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, June 21-28, 2014

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basic American principles:   (see “God-ordained spheres”, below)

blank check: any Dem spending priority. By definition, all Dem spending is profligate, wasteful and boundless.

constitutional balance: when the GOP Congress gets its way.

cosmopolitanism: sneering characterization of Obama’s foreign policy. Meant ironically, especially when coupled with “enlightened”.

God-ordained spheres: the family, the church, the NRA.

heavy-handed: mandatory modifier of “government regulation”.

hypersensitivity: staged emotion on a phony issue, designed to rally the pc crowd. For example, college women and college administrators are now routinely characterized as being “hypersensitive” to sexual abuse charges. Also sometimes known as “playing the race card”.

panic: any Dem social regulation policy or belief. Increasingly used as a mandatory modifier for “climate change”. Aka, hysteria, overreach, hypersensitivity. Any policy Dem policy that the Tea Party opposes is seen as “purposefully, willfully and unnecessarily induced”.

regulatory zeal: any Dem regulation whatsoever. Zeal in this cse is seen as “overreach,” “hubris” or “political agenda”. (see also “heavy-handed,” above)

runaway: any public official, regulatory office, prosecutor or judge making law or public policy that the Tea Party doesn’t like.

unlimited entitlement: a redundancy because all Obama supporters have an unlimited sense of desert, just as all government spending is a “blank check” (see above).

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, June 16-20, 2014

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abdication: all O admin foreign policy, which has conceded all moral and political ground to the jihadists, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and Assad. This charge of pacifism is the binary in the false narrative that our foreign policy must either be muscularly interventionist or isolationist.

control: the only thing “liberals” really want–what the Tea Party incoherently calls “control over our lives.” This “control” is something that can only be “restored” after the Tea Party takes the White House in 2016. (see “restore,” below).

deviancy: the O admin’s determined crusade to make the “normal” seem “deviant” and the “deviant” seem “normal.”

Draconian: any O admin regulation or policy.

greed: the motivating urge of all Gays, who defy nature due to unbridled lust.

hard truths: anything the Tea Party believes in, and, thus by extension, everything the O admin can’t face or even perceive. Part of the GOP’s rhetorical masterplay of fashioning themselves as the “daddy party”.

intrusion: formerly known as “government”.

Munchkin Metternichs: everyone serving in the Obama  State Dept. or foreign policy advisory team.

restore: the Tea Party task after they win the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016: “restore America to itself”. Another doomed search for a lost utopia that never was.

reverse Robin Hood: the O admin’s determined crusade to “make the poor richer and the rich poorer”.

show trials: GOP term for any judicial action against bankers, CEOs, polluters, or Wall Street execs.

squandered freedom: (see “zombie ideas”, below). The entirely fanciful notion that we Obama has “lost” a war that we had “won” in Iraq. See previous incarnations of this meme: “who lost China?”,  “who lost Vietnam?”

world order: interpreted by the GOP as entirely dependent on American power.

zombie ideas: ideas that are are thoroughly discredited, but can’t seem to be killed off. For example, trickle-down economics; “we won the war in Iraq”; “global warming is a hoax”; “our health care system is the envy of the world”, or  “the more unregulated financial markets are, the better they will perform”.

 

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, June 1-8, 2014

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American hero: not Bo Bergdahl, who, in Tea Party snap cnsensius opinion, should be summarily executed. Can we please place a moratorium on calling all soldiers “heroes”? After all, if everyone is above average, then being “above average” is just the average. Could we live in a world without “heroes”? Can the media exist in a world where they have to do something rather than either lionize or demonize?

apparatchiks: all government workers and Dem campaign operatives.

Benghazi 2.0: the Bo Bergdahl prisoner release. To the GOP, another smoking gun on the road to impeachment, revealing how Obama is somehow simultaneously  a master plotter, scheming to close Guantanamo, and the most incompetent president ever.

blather and sanctimony:  anything and everything Obama says.

course choice:  euphemism for vouchers

democratization: euphemism for Citizens United & the Koch Brothers’ takeover of the electoral process. In this counter-intuitive argument, unfettered corporate campaign spending translates into greater transparency and more widespread political participation.

domestic politics:  what every one of Obama’s policies and actions “pander” to, as if the GOP is above concern about electability.

extreme regulation: basically, any regulation.

healthcare portability: code language for freeing up insurance companies from state regulation.

gentry liberals: a recycled current version of the old “Chardonnay and brie” label for liberals and Democrats. Implies that the Dems have long since abandoned the working class, and have been captured by the preppy elite. The Tea Partiers describe the lives of these Dem elites with so much intense hatred (and detail), that they seem to be engaged in a form of class envy.

honor: one of the “daddy words” in the moral matrix that the GOP claims ownership of, along with sacrifice, glory, duty, patriot, loyalty, authority, sanctity, etc.

reform: a misnomer and a misdirection, because the GOP doesn’t in any way plan to change anything. A keyword for GOP repositioning and reinvention of the same old principles of market-driven public policy, deregulation, massive tax cuts, and making government small enough to, as Grover Norquist put it,  drown in a bathtub.

usurpations:  any Obama executive order or regulatory policy. Has come to stand for anything he does without Congress.

victory lap: what Obama did in the Bo Bergdahl case. Basically, now used to characterize Obama whenever he takes credit for anything.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, May 25-31, 2014

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activist attorneys: like “activist judges”, these lawyers have the audacity to try and change public policy or laws by advocating for social change.

anointed: a mocking term for the self-congratulatory liberal elites, who only hold their positions due to cronyism or political correctness. (aka, “self-appointed”). (see also, “grandees,” below).

forfeited gains:  the rebirth of the “who lost Vietnam?” meme, in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan. The gist is “we had it won, but blew it”. As if.

grandees: liberal elites.

intrusion: what government does, by nature. Implies  that there is no “public” interest, but only “private” freedom, which government intrudes upon, like a home invader. Almost criminalizes the whole concept of government.

isolationist: Obama, except when he’s being a “multilateralist”.  (see below)

level playing field: euphemism for the lowest common denominator–the race to the bottom.  Assumes that regulation should be based on the short-term best interests of those being regulated,  not on that which, from the viewpoint of public interest,  is prudent, reasonable and morally necessary.

multilateralist: Obama, except when he’s being an “isolationist”. “American Exceptionalism” is essentially one-sided.

over-educated (liberal elites): too much of the wrong kinda larning, like them humanities and social sciences.

the muscular successful classes vs. the hyphenated classes: immigrants as losers.

racializing: even mentioning race or putting anything into a racial context. We should all be Colbert-like and not even see race, which would magically make racism disappear.

socialist paradise: sneering characterization of the VA, or any guvment social safety net or redistribution program

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, May 19-24, 2014

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accomplices:Afro-Americans supporting Obamafascism. Unwitting dupes, acting against their own best interests.

amok:as in “bureaucrats run amok”.

bi-coastal: a sneer, especially reserved for the “urban media elite”.  Basically a variation on the old Sarah Palin meme about how the GOP represents the “real America” (aka “flyover America). Bi-coastal clearly implies bi-sexual.

gotcha: any question posed to a Tea Partier by the Dems. Like “science,” questions themselves have no intrinsic value opr demand to be answered–best to just rephrase them or call them an attack. More or less the end of critical inquiry

government control: paired in a false dichotomy with “personal liberty”. Another of these dueling essentialisms is entitlement v. equality. In both cases, the destructive effect (government control, entitlement) is said to drive out the virtuous value (personal liberty, equality).

industry: any organized Dem constituency or cause, as in “The Grievance Industry” or “The Hillary Clinton Industry”.

outfit: a government agency the GOP doesn’t like or wants to eliminate

taming the Tea Party: the meme of the week, masking the fact that all GOP candidates, including former centrists such Boehner & McConnell, have had to move all the way to the right to not be primaried.

taxation: the ultimate form of government aggression; never a force for good.

unreasonable: a regulatory agency or tax the GOP despises and wants to eliminate. In Tea Party logic, all taxes and regulation are unreasonable.

warmism: the central tenet of Climate Change Conspirators.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, May 4-12, 2014

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alarmism: any Dem projection of current trends into the future. More or less the same kind of demeaning speech act as saying to a woman, “don’t get hysterical”. Most common usage” “climate alarmism”. When the GOP warns of the corrosive effects of tax cuts or federal regulation, they are being “realistic” or “pragmatic,” but never “alarmist”.

Beltway Boys: any Dem political insider. Part of the GOP spin that the Dems are a permanent DC political class, feathering their own nests whilst pretending to car about the poor.

class hatred: any Dem claim about social justice, redistribution, equality, etc. aka, ‘envy”.

eroded liberty: A self-fulfilling prophecy. Liberty here is taken as a kind of utopian state that has been steadily and persistently undermined by liberal ideology. As an absolute, non-negotiable demand for civil society, any attempts to regulate individuals within that society are seen as “erosions” of this absolute. A permanent state of war between the individual and the state is thus pre-ordained.

exaggerations: any positive claims made for OCare. Such claims, by definition, are thus “inaccurate”.

guarantor: the ultimate effect of Obama administration policy that supports any social services, social safety net or entitlement programs. The gist of this usage is that the Obama administration underwrites and maintains a permanent culture of poverty and dependency.

industry:  any widespread Dem policy support or advocacy–as in “the campus rape industry” or “the ‘climate change’ industry”. Implies a permanent conspiracy of lobbyists, think tanks, pols, and government officials who care more about their careers than about the issues.

mobility: the preferred word choice to “inequality”.  Instead of talking about difference, tries to shift the talk to possibility. Of course, framed this way, the only mobile part of the population are the rich. With stagnating wages and eroded job growth and quality, most Americans are in fact downwardly mobile.

playing the political process: Dems’ way of framing any issue–Benghazi, OCare, immigration, etc. The Dems always “pander to the base”, “politicizing” everything. In reality, by announcing early on that their chief aim was to make sure the Obama Presidency failed, the GOP are actually the ones who made EVERYTHING political.

“scientific consensus”: the fright quotes are the new way to sneer at all science as a liberal “hoax”. Not understanding what consensus means in this case, the Tea Party folks are ushering in a pre-Enlightenment, faith-based orthodoxy.

unleash: what happens when the Dems write a new law or policy, inflicting it on individuals, and thus “eroding” their liberty.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, April 26-May 3, 2014

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American possibilities (or promise): The root narrative of America as the “exceptional” City on the Hill–what Obama either doesn’t “get” or is indifferent to.  Apparently, approving the the Keystone Pipeline is the current sure-fire way to promote American possibilities and overcome Obama’s “Opportunity Gap”.

“assault weapons”: Never used without fright quotes, which always mean “so-called”. Maybe “assault” will be the next verb slapped into fright-quote handcuffs, as in “standing your ground” rather than assaulting someone.

base-pandering: what Democrats unfailingly–and primarily– engage in when they issue any policy, opinion, or regulation.

cerebral: one of Obama’s many fatal flaws. Strangely enough, he is simultaneously accused of being “simple-minded” (see below).

cynical promotion of fears:what Dems really do do whenever they attack right-wing ideas or policies. It’s cynical because it’s calculated, disingenuous, and self-serving: no one in their right mind could believe in climate change, the stifling of political speech, racism, or income inequality. Never mind that it’s actually the right wing that is totally dependent on a permanent culture war, enduring political enemies such as Hillary, and the steady blue flame of outrage and fear of “losing the country”.

economic gimmicks: what Dems have to resort to whenever they report (see below, “eke out” ) good economic numbers. The biggest economic gimmick of all is demand-side economic policy.

eked out: very grudging GOP description of any positive economic news–used only when they aren’t disparaging or ignoring  the news altogether, as when they refer to jobs lost rather than jobs gained.

encroachment on states’ sovereignty: any federal law or policy that doesn’t defer to the states.

ensconced: the quality of being any Dem office holder or employee. Subtly undermines the legitimacy of holding a job in public service, as if it’s all due to patronage and (see above), base-pandering.

grandees: especially “ensconced” Dem office holders, lobbyists, lawyers, commentators, etc. Clearly implies that they “think they’re better” than average folks. Republican grand poobahs are instead called “leaders”.

hostage to lobbyists: said to be the defining characteristic of the entire Democratic D.C. establishment; Republicans, on the other hand, are said to be “responsive to constituencies” and respecters of The Market.

obsessions: any Dem policy position that is stated more than once.

one-size-fits-all: the Dems’ ideological strait-jacket and political orthodoxy that is imposed on the American People

simple-minded: part of the tragedy of our fatally-flawed, “cerebral” President is that his ideas are one-dimensional and simplistic: markets are evil and inherently unfair; economic growth is only for the rich and should be regulated and choked at the source, the only way to lead is “from behind,” etc.

“wage gap”: exactly like “the war on women,” this phrase now must always be used with fright quotes because it is purely fictional Dem propaganda. After all, everyone knows there are no glass ceilings, except when there are, and that’s because of obvious “structural” or “inherent” reasons that maybe only men can grasp. Other phrases that right wingers consider insulting or risible: “living wage,” “income inequality,” save the earth”.