Category Archives: glossary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

shiftless and inferior: the “takers”.

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

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

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

 

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, July 7-July 13, 2014.]

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actual: the Reality Principle, represented by GOP positions. For example, there is said to be no proof of man’s “actual” contribution to climate change.

barnacled leviathan state: government as Moby-Dick.

the benefits of market cycles: never measured relative to the costs or imbalances.

complexities and ambiguities: invoked only to undercut a Dem policy provision, this classic tactical rhetorical turn justifies a haze of statistics, half-truths, and faculty causal links and associations. The end effect of this technique is to show that a liberal policy or position is either groundless (e.g., there is no global warming caused by human behavior), or dangerous because it it only makes things worse ( e.g., redistributionist social policy increases poverty and dependency, higher taxes increase deficits, or regulation of the market only makes the market more inefficient).

disparaging of the successful: the war on the rich, based on the envy of the takers at the success of the makers.

doom-mongering: what Dems resort to when defining social issues; basically, any assessment of any but the rosiest future for an unfettered America. Not a problem when the GOP starts talking about the sense of “besiegment and foreboding” the Obama administration has caused in “normal” people.

dynamism of American enterprise: only unleashed by the removal of government regulation. Government here is by definition the opposite of dynamic.

fear and peril: what “normal” Americans are feeling as the cumulative impact of the Obama administration; a sense of “besiegement and foreboding”.

foisted: how Dem legislation is imposed on the American people.

the fumes of greatness: what we’re said to be huffing in this era of American decline under Obama. Afaded glory, a nostalgia for a lost utopia that never was.

green handouts: (cronyism): any government subsidy of alternative energy companies or technologies.

liturgy: standard Dem screeds. Actually, any Dem policy position, here characterized as a rote, ritualistic form of supplication.

normal people:everyone who doesn’t support Obama. Part of the long-standing attempt to villify the Dems as “other”: weird, elitist, and self-serving.

preach: what Dems use their “liturgy” in support of. All Dem positions are thus a moralistic defense of  rigid ideology or faith.

predictable: the inevitable failure of Dem policies. For example, it is predictable that any market regulation will strangle the market, that anti-poverty programs increase poverty, and that government spending starves the economy.

“the rich”:a mythical entity conjured up the the Left to fire up “normal” people into class warfare.Best used in fright quotes.

self-correcting and self-immunizing: the free market, here characterized as a kind of perpetual motion machine.

unserious: the feckless, golf-crazy Obama, when he isn’t plotting a socialist takeover of the entire US economy.

subsidy and mandate: the only way progressive social policy can operate, thus guaranteeing it’s “predictable” demise.

 

 

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 9-15 2014

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anchor of stability (Iraq): nostalgia for a lost world that never was; the fleeting phantom of Middle East peace and stability, rooted in Baghdad

the approved victim scorecard: part of the so-called “victim industry,” this meme is just another version of what used to be sneeringly called “political correctness”. Implies that every liberal position is politically calculated and has no moral center.(See below, “privilege of sexual assault victims”).

crusaders: mocking, belittling term for anyone with a strong belief, taking a principled stand. Thus those who support the free market are said to be taking a common sense, moral stand, but anyone “supporting” (as if it’s a matter of opinion) climate change or inequality, is a crusader. This also implies that such liberals are fighting a holy war.

cronyism: what Dems do when they govern, only “ladling out” (or, see below, “funnel”) benefits to their politically-correct friends. When Republicans do this, it’s just called governing.

frivolity (self-indulgence, silliness):increasingly, almost any policy position or initiative the Obama administration undertakes. Implies that they are amateur and childish.

funneling: what cronys do.

hacks: any Congressional Democrat, administration official, or member of the “lame stream media”.

post-American world: assuming that America has abdicated its position of dominant world power, this is the GOP version of a Hobbesian world where either power or religious fanaticism rule. America as a “pitiful, helpless giant”. This is yet another false GOP binary: either intervene forcefully in Syria, Egypt, Libya, the Ukraine, Iraq, etc. or cravenly disengage. This lack of a middle ground of constructive engagement implies that everyone else in the world is “other”.

privilege (of sexual assault victims): George Will’s particularly vile column suggesting that college women bring sexual assault charges to gain instant social and political prestige and advantage. How long will it be before the GOP starts insinuating that “charges” of slavery are used for political privilege?

trampling: what Dem policies do to democracy, speech, religious freedom, the free market, etc.

 

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