Category Archives: rhetoric

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Dec 7-10, 2013

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apologist: anyone who defends the Obama administration or the Senate. Aka, “sycophant”.

dignity and purpose: The very qualities the spineless, profligate, illegitimate President lacks.This is a kind of master trope, trotted out to defend pro-life activists, the military, free marketeers, and non-freeloading, working Americans.

false narrative: any claim about Obama administration successes–always of course manufactured by the Democrats. Recent “fale narratives” included: the ACA as being afforable and offering Americans choices in health insurance; Obama as successfully countering terrorism, and the economy as in any way better than it was when Obama took office.

firm response: bellicose GOP foreign policy initiatives–the opposite of “rewarding terrorism”–see below.

nannies: any government official. Aka, “self-appointed experts”.

power grab: any law or administrative policy or procedure originating anywhere in the Executive Branch or the Senate. Republican laws or policies are, on the other hand, always “reasonable” or “legitimate” exercises of governing. Aka, “fiat”.

resentment: the predominant ruling humor of all of the “dependent” classes, the “freeloaders,” etc. The only reason people sign up for food stamps, unemployment benefits, disability claims and welfare. Somehow, though, those on other forms of federal aid–Medicare, for example–are deserving and not all resentful of the accomplishments of the wealthy.

rewarding terrorism: any sign of a diplomatic olive branch, rapprochement, softening or reconciliation toward Syria, Iran, China, Russia  or any “othered” country. Aka, “romancing” tyrants or jihadis; “retreat”, “capitulation”.

tax simplification: lowering taxes and making them more regressive. Much like “regulatory reform,” this is a pure euphemism for drowning government spending in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist once put it.

true school reform: vouchers and privatization.

turning attention away from Obamacare: basically, discussing any other subject, such as inequality, Iranian nuclear disarmament, immigration reform, or gun control. Did Mandela die to turn attention away from Obamacare?

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Dec. 1-3, 2013

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abdication of power: any Obama administration foreign policy initiative that does not include invasion, bombing, sanctions or coups.

blank check: any Democratic Congressional spending. According to the GOP, Democrats have carte blanche to write “blank checks” for immigrant benefits, birth control, food stamp recipients, and other forms of social parasite.

censorship: any GOP-spun meme, such as Benghazi, that the media doesn’t ceaselessly report on. Also referred to “underreporting” or “muzzling” by the Democratic “media pimps”.

crackdown: any regulatory or legal action taken against GOP-favored corporations, PACs or individuals. When the GOP does this, it’s jst a matter of enforcing the law. When the Dems enforce the law, their “crackdown” is always the result of “neuluous and arbitrary enforcement.”

executive fiat: anything Obama does that the GOP doesn’t support. When Bush did the same things, it was called “Presidential leadership”.

knockout game: the latest meme/metaphor for any Obama policy–how he has “mugged” the American people by “lying” about Benghazi, the IRS, the ACA, etc. Also shorthand for the libidinally-transgressive, ever-present baleful threat of the black man.

resentment: the root motivation for all Democratic social programs. Aka, “playing the race card,” “reverse discrimination,” and  “victimhood”.

statistical ploy: any Democratic use of statistics to support policy positions, social service provision, or regulatory reform.

utopian blather: anything and everything that Obama talks about.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Nov. 19-26, 2013

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abject; mandatory intensifier for any Obama policy outcomes: abject failure, abject surrender, abject fraud.

feckless: trusty GOP catch-all descriptor for any Obama initiative; almost always used in the vicinity of its cousin-epithet, “weak”.

innovative: an inherent quality of any “pro-market” economic or political reform.

managerial liberalism: much worse than mere liberalism because of its Command and Control overtones. The rhetorical move here is to make a neutral term–like management–into an invidious one. Akin to using “trial lawyers” rather than just “lawyers”.

naked: much like “abject”, an intensifier used to magnify the painful effects of an Obama policy, as in a “naked power-grab”, or in the sentence, “Obamacare is a naked takeover of one-sixth of national economy”.

regulatory uncertainty: a kind of redundancy in the sense that all regulation–or, rather, the mere possibility of regulation–creates uncertainty. Oddly enough, in this tried-and-true rhetorical move, something “regular” is characterized as a source of radical instability.

serfdom: what Obama has put America on the road to, as explained by Friedrich von Hayek.

servility: what is leading America– suddenly a “servile nation”– to serfdom, under the spell of Obama the Charlatan, Obama the Liar.

sucker-punch: Obama’s devious and unscrupulous way of prevailing in foreign or domestic policy. Both the ACA and the Iran agreement are now routinely referred to as “sucker punches” to the trusting American public.

thinker: Paul Ryan. NOT Rick Perry.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Nov. 15-18

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budget-busting: any new government spending the GOP doesn’t like.

cradle-to-grave care: any social welfare/safety net laws or policies. AKA, redistributionism, dependency, freeloading, Big Government.

end of liberalism: Krauthammer’s grandiose, hyperventilating claim for the endgame  of the vicissitudes of Obamacare.

fiat: Any Obama administration policy. The House rules by consensus and the rule of law, the White House by fiat.

fix: The thing that can never be done to Obamacare. The GOP scorched earth policy has always been no reform, no accommodation. As happened last week, when Obama does accommodate, his overtures are instantly and cynically dismissed as either political gimmickry or outright illegality. Obamacare is the GOP Alamo: no surrender. And just ask a texan: Ted Cruz. it’s in the Bible, right? Don’t gut it, kill it.

jam: the only way any Democrat-sponsored bill can get through Congress. Alternatively, anything the GOP passes is based on “consensus”. Aka, “demagoguery”.

Katrina:  Obamacare. Of course ma national health care plan is the same as the government causing–and then ignoring– the victims of a devastating flood. Aka, Obama’s Iran-Contra, or, of course, a “catastrophe,” a “disaster” or a “Greek tragedy”.

panic: any Dem response to the vicissitudes pf the Obamacare rollout. Even common-sense fixes to the law are characterized as “panic”.

preening elites: Democrats.

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Nov. 1-3, 2013

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the American people: In the rhetoric of Ted Cruz’s Manichean morality play, always under threat by any Democratic policy or initiative. Rhetorically, they serve as his ethical lodestar and source of fathomless pathos. The ACA is portrayed as an especially dire existential threat to them. Note: Democrats–or even Republicans opposed to any Cruz policy or vote–are excluded from this group.

arbritrary standards: the provisions of any Democratic policy the GOP rejects. (aka, “diktat”). In the case of the ACA, this becomes a blanket indictment of coverage for maternity care, preventive medicine, family planning, substance abuse, mammograms, etc. Other  “arbitrary” standards would include annual or lifetime reimbursement caps, rate equity for women,  and exclusions for preexisting conditions. The rhetorical irony here is that, strictly speaking all “standards” are “arbitrary”, as opposed, I suppose, to inherent, absolute, or natural. Values, morals, and ethics are all ultimately “arbitrary,” but that doesn’t make them any less defensible or legitimate. The GOP uses “arbitrary” as a pejorative term, while their policies are, on the other hand, “common sense” “model reforms” or “realistic”.

death spiral: what the ACA is purportedly headed into–all imaginary, premature, and unmitigated wishful GOP thinking.

overpriced: all aspects of the ACA, due to its “arbitrary standards”. Never mind that comparing it to the lesser coverage of current policies is comparing apples and oranges, the rhetorical purpose of this descriptor is to undercut all ACA provisions by invidious comparisons.

paternalistic: any imposition of “arbitrary standards” by the “nanny state” or the “urban, genteel elitists”. When Republicans ban abortion, they of course are being “paternalistic,” but “pro-life”. AKA, “liberal paternalism”.

Progressivism: a political, social and economic movement in the united states that lasted from the tun of the 20th Century until the Autumn of 2013, with the coming of Obamacare. progressives were especially known for their “hatred” of free markets, property, and private enterprise.

public outrage: when the GOP astroturfs a citizens’ uprising, it’s called Jacksonian democracy; when the Democrats talk about concepts such as “corporate welfare” or “the 1%,” it’s called divisive class warfare and phony or misplaced anger fomented by “special interests”. AKA, “witch hunt,” “cramdown,” “intimidation” or “inquisition”.

scheme: any Democratic bill or policy–ACA proponents pushing this “scheme” are now seen as liars, grifters, or con artists.

showered: how campaign contributions are bestowed on Democrats.

stacking: what Democrats do when they nominate anyone for an executive or judicial branch appointment.

statists: those who believe government has a role in public policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloomberg, 9/20/2010

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

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

Wall Street Journal, 9/30/13

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

Obamacare Arrives, WSJ, 9/30/13

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

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

followed by a launch into rhetorical hyperspace:

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

“Worse Is the New Normal

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

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

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

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

Salon, “GOP’s Most Shameful Shutdown Moment”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glossary, late July, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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