Category Archives: rhetoric

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, September 11-24, 2014

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against social democracy: by the logic of this argument, advocates of social equity, safety nets, etc are actually elitists, pushing their agenda of  “big guv’mnt” onto the majority of Americans who reject it.

apologist: any Obama administration spokesperson or defender.

fathomless ignorance: best personified by Barack Obama.

freedom fighters: secessionists,  Tea Partiers, libertarians, gun nuts, fundamentalist Christians

hubris: the by-product of naive liberal redistributionist philosophy- a cult of innocents.

liturgies of absolution: any defense of the lazy poor, social safety net programs, etc. Akin to “apologists” (see above).

nostalgia: what fuels naive Obama foreign policy–a yearning for a lost world of harmony and pluralism.

occupying army: any government workers.

resentment: what fuels the “takers” in their sponging off the “makers”.

soft underbelly: the US-Mexico border. Always said to be “porous”. A known conduit for Al Qaeda, ebola, bird flu, polio, Isis, and, lately, ISIS. The surest invasion path for forces that “want to drown us in our own blood”.

steady hand: what we needed to prevent “squandering” our glorious victory in in Iraq. Related meme: “if only if we had kept 10,000 troops there,” presumably in perpetuity.

tax-and-spend-and regulate: the worst kind of Dem dogma. Imagine, people who actually want to govern. What, exactly, does Tea Party orthodoxy offer as an alternative to taxing, spending and regulating?

violation of democratic norms: any government regulation, especially anything coming out of the EPA.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Aug 29-September 9, 2014

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character: The major personal trait that the “takers” lack. This is a master trope in GOP rhetoric, linked to dignity, “personal responsibility” and “integrity”.  “Cynical” Dems, who take the politically expedient side of every opportunity, are especially deficient charcter-wise.

critical variables: any available extenuating circumstances that Republicans can come up to argue their case. Also, excuses they make for such failed policies and theories as “trickle down,” “regulatory strangulation” and the “invisible hand” of the “free” market.

cynical: any politically-expedient act of policy of Obama or the Dems. By the magical inversion of rhetoric, any statement of idealism or hope becomes a “cynical ploy”.

defeatism: any critique of American military action.

natural rights liberty: the God-given right to carry a semi-automatic weapon, shoot anyone suspicious, stifle free speech, refuse to pay taxes, etc. The ideological bedrock of libertarianism.

personal responsibility: what the “takers” are critically lacking. No one receiving any government aid in any form whatsoever is said to lack this quality, which is semantically linked to dignity, honor

reckless: any Dem claim of facts, outcomes, accomplishments, etc.

social capital: what people lacking “personal responsibility” lack and can’t even conceive of.

sycophant: any Obama supporter.

tawdry: any Obama rationale, behavior, or explanation. Everything he does is “tawdry” because he lacks “character” and won’t take “personal responsibility” for anything.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, innuendos, and metanarratives in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Aug 8- 18, 2014

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bulwark against evil:  Captain America, aka, “the lead actor on the world stage”. In a Manichean universe, there are no shades of gray, and “the axis of evil” is ever-present and ubiquitous.

calculating Clinton: when Hillary does or says anything, she is characterized as a calculating, power-hungry Machiavellian who will stop at nothing to attain absolute power and reign over Hillaryland. When GOP candidates speak, on the other hand,  they aren’t called “calculating”, but, rather, “thoughtful” (especially Paul Ryan) or “courageous” (especially Ted Cruz and Rand Paul).

the climate line: some concocted scare story made up by a cabal of left-wing scientists. Just plain malarkey.

dead-end bottom feeders: the Ferguson protestors;and now they have the temerity to want to register to vote!

getting ahead: the ultimate goal of human life, defined by struggle and striving. The Horatio Alger myth is alive and well, even if it means a Darwinian struggle for mastery and inevitable inequality, the antithesis of capitalism. Funny how the “goals” to be reached are all defined by the GOP: wealth, privilege, rugged individualism and an almost total absence of government regulation.

injecting race into the conversation: registering black voters.

the lead actor on the world stage: a rhetorical cousin of “American exceptionalism“.

the poor’s overseers: according to GOP rhetoric, the Dems are the ones who have been creating poverty and holding the poor back from “getting ahead”. In this rhetorical never-never land, satisfying the poor’s “needs” (heat, shelter, food, health care, education) is a a fool’s errand until and unless the poor get some ambition to “get ahead,” so the Republicans can finally help them “reach their goals”.

a true market: one that transparently runs on pure information and rational choices. In other words, a fairy tale. We won’t have true markets in the US until the kenyan socialist leaves office.

unimpeded evil: what  the world would be subject to without America, the only “bulwark against evil”.

the wealth effect: the magical thinking that spawned the “trickle down theory”: that all boats rise on a rising tide. Despite no lasting signs that this magical “effect” ever took hold or lasted for most Americans in any Republican administration, the myth persists. This persistence can perhaps be attributed to how well it has worked for the rich and privileged.

 

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”.