Category Archives: rhetoric

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, July 1-10, 2017

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political stunt

rhetorical claim: state electoral commissions’ refusal to provide the Election Integrity Commission with publicly available voter data is a political stunt

rhetorical effect: calling it a “stunt” rather than a principled position mocks and degrades it, turning voter information into a political time bomb. Appears to be a perfectly innocent, common sense request, whereas it actually is a wolf in sheep’s cloths, requesting privacy data (such as social security numbers and party affiliation) of all voters.

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people will die

rhetorical claim: Dems tell us that Medicare cuts will lead to people dying. Rhetoric suggesting that “elected leaders are murderers if they dare pare back the welfare state” is both hypocritical and dangerous, By the Democrats’ logic, Barack Obama killed people. After all, some people lost health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. Heck, life expectancy went down for the first time in decades after Obamacare went into effect.

Taken literally, such rhetoric means that entitlement reform is impossible, because any attempt to get our fiscal house in order would require some people, somewhere, to lose some benefits.

rhetorical effect: this justificatory GOP irony works hard to delegitimize any claims that Medicaid cuts will harm people-even that they are cuts at all. This dismissal of claims of harm opens the door for their main black-is-white lies: that Medicaid cuts will “stabilize” insurance markets, will also protect the poor better than ever before. This is analogous to the argument that more consumer “choice” of health plans will give Americans better coverage, instead of merely  eliminating any quality minimums.

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heath care standardization and quality minimums

rhetorical claim: more consumer “choice” of health plans will give Americans access to better coverage.

rhetorical effect: “min-med” policies that cover virtually nothing will be allowed to proliferate as insurers rush to tweak plans that cater only the young and healthy; people won’t discover that they aren’t covered until it’s too late; eliminates quality minimums and standardization of health plans; increases likelihood of soaring deductibles, hidden exclusions, and skimpy coverage of actual conditions; makes it impossible to comparison shop health plans; greatly increases opportunities for obfuscation of terms and exclusions (i.e., covering one time of medicine for maybe only a month, or excluding some cancers from coverage altogether). The only “freedom to choose” will be either skimpy policies or Obama-care quality policies that will be too expensive and collapse. Freedom to have access does not mean freedom to afford.

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he’s a counter-puncher

rhetorical claim: The president’s tweets is  a fighter and a counterpuncher who needs to return fire on the fake media. When they hot him, he hits back twice as hard.

rhetorical effect: “He’s a fighter” and “He’s a counterpuncher” are not serious arguments. They’re simply euphemistic descriptions of his tendency to let his id run free like an escaped monkey from a cocaine study. He intentionally equates “winning” with dominating the narrative, defining success tautologically as succeeding.

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Leftist violence

rhetorical claim: the mainstream media play down incidents such as the Steve Scalise shooting when they are carried out by avowed liberals. They also minimize or ignore the anti-Trump hatred generated by Kathy Griffin, Shakespeare in the Park, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, etc.

rhetorical effect: this fallacy of false equivalency conflates violence with criticism, and criminalizes free speech. In line with the meme that the press is the enemy of the people, this hyperbolic claim of progressive violence also excuses racist hatred and violence on the right.

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tax collectors for the entitlement state

rhetorical claim: big government advocates (aka, the dishonest left and the timid right), who see themselves as tax collectors for the entitlement state, are calling for keeping Obamacare’s surtax on investment income. Economic merits do not seem to count in this political fantasia. The reason to repeal the surtax isn’t to reward the rich, but to increase the stock of capital and improve the incentives for capital formation, which in turns increases labor productivity, wages and job creation.

rhetorical effect: this unified field theory of the great Trickle Down is an attempt to cloak the wolf of enormous tax cuts for the wealthy in the sheep’s clothes of greater prosperity for all. The tax cuts come immediately and irretrievably–the wider prosperity not so quickly, even to the vanishing point. Conservative magical thinking orthodoxy is clearly at work here, a kind of domino theory of inevitable causation: tax cuts beget capital, labor productivity and jobs. Tax cuts are thus presented as the magical elixir, fixing all of our economic inequalities, inadequacies, and sluggishness.

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the rent-seeking, parasite economy

rhetorical claim: the Beltway’s deep state is a rent-seeking, parasitic economy based on government bloat, regulatory stranglehold over the rest of America, unbridled greed, cultural and social elitism, and unrivaled hypocrisy.

rhetorical effect: any advocate of regulation, equality, justice, or the social safety net is dismissed as a “parasite,”–a blood-sucking vermin drinking up the blood of the real Americans. This is another rhetorical step toward dehumanizing the left, thus justifying violence and persecution against them.

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the bonds of culture, faith and tradition

rhetorical claim: radical Islamic terrorists are trying to undermine the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that unite the US and the West against barbarism. Any defense of justification of them thus erodes civilization itself.

rhetorical effect: revives the “blood, God and country” totalitarian militarism of Nazi Germany. Conflates identity, nationalism and religion in a way that criminalizes any minority religious beliefs and castigates them as uncivilized. Promotes a zero-sum clash of civilizations: whenever one wins, the other loses. Dehumanizes Islam and essentializes white, Eurocentric values. It’s not clear who “our civilization” will “triumph” over, but it is clear that Trump sees a coming cultural Armageddon and wants to be Crusader In Chief.

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The modern day  Presidential

rhetorical claim: Trump’s tweets and campaign rallies are the “modern day Presidential,” and thus a departure from boring speeches and policy papers.

rhetorical effect: debases public discourse; gives rise to character assassination of opponents; offer simple solutions to complex problems; allows for contradiction and ambiguity. Leads to a total public breakdown of political communication.

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responsibility as accountability

rhetorical claim: individual responsibility means making people accountable for their lives and circumstances.

rhetorical effect: ends the notion of responsibility as a social duty; makes welfare and social safety net programs seem like handouts from the “winners” to the losers,” shifts the focus of government from the collective to the individual.

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the question of Russian interference

moving forward

rhetorical claim: the whole issue of Russian interference ion our election cycle, is, according to Rex Tillerson, a “question.” Donald Trump agrees, pointing pout that “we’ll probably never know” the truth and we should move forward in our relations with Russia.

rhetorical effect: confuses absolute certainty with high probability; by calling it a question rather than a fact, casts the entire process as a controversy or even a conspiratorial fantasy; “moving forward” means not looking back–in other words, a cover-up and total exoneration of Putin.

 

 

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, June 27-29, 2017

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choice

rhetorical claim: Trumpcare will offer consumers more choices than Obamacare, with a wider variety of premium costs and  deductibles, better coverage to the neediest, etc.  This will put heath care in the hands of consumers, not the government

rhetorical effect: makes it sound like even Medicaid is a “choice,” with lots of alternatives–just another marketplace where consumers can make their own choices according to their own tastes and budgets, as they might at Whole Foods or Walmart,Of course, it isn’t—people forced off Medicaid will not have anywhere else to go and thus will be back to emergency room visits to cover all medical issues. ‘Choice” to the GOP always means being at the dictates of the supposedly flawless “free market,” which is ‘”free” only if you believe collusion, price-fixing, and obscene profits don’t exist. What will the concept of a “free market” mean when elderly Medicare recipients are suddenly priced out of their nursing homes? When the GOP says ‘”choice” they actually mean either unaffordability or ultra-skimpy insurance plans. As explained in the Washington Post:

It would make individual market premiums, even after including subsidies, prohibitively expensive, effectively locking millions out of the “choice” of individual insurance, too.

In fact, for some unlucky people, subsidized individual plans would disappear entirely. That’s because the Senate bill says that people offered any employer coverage would become ineligible for subsidized insurance on the exchanges — even if they can’t actually afford the plan their employer offers.

I suppose lots of sick people will newly have the “choice” of buying an expensive plan that covers none of the services they need. So there’s that.

When all’s said and done, there’s just one major Republican health-care principle this bill remains loyal to: tax cuts for the rich.

In the new GOP rhetoric, “choice” now connotes greed without shame, the neediest be damned.

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freedom

rhetorical claim: Trumpcare will finally give Americans the freedom to only buy the health care they want, and to stop subsidizing the unhealthy lifestyles of others.

rhetorical effect: The only freedom Trumpcare offers is the freedom for rich people to not be taxed. Oh, and poor people would have the freedom to buy insurance with a deductible they cannot afford. In this case, the best slogan  for Trumpcare, comes from Janis Joplin: “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

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mandate

rhetorical claim: Trumpcare will eliminate all government mandates and let the people choose their own healthcare.

rhetorical effect: obscures the true reality of Trumpcare, which is itself a gigantic mandate to take an entitlement away from the poor and give a tax cut to the rich. Survival of the richest! Also obscures the latest Trumpcare mandate: the “tweak” that fines those who go without insurance for six months.

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upgraded state insurance markets

rhetorical claim: Trumpcare will give states the flexibility to upgrade insurance markets.

rhetorical effect: “upgrades” will entail reduced coverage, higher deductibles, annual and lifetime caps, and restricted access to Medicaid. The only thing upgraded will be insurance company profits. Synonyms for “upgrade” include “choice”, “enhanced”, “efficient”, “unleashed” and “patient-centered.”

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enhanced understanding

rhetorical claim: Due to the so-called “enhanced understanding” of liberal federal  judges, progressives smugly think that unelected judges know best when it comes to issues best fitted for federalist (that is, state)  solutions, such as abortion and marriage. More proof that they believe the American public can’t be trusted.

rhetorical effect: pits progressives against “the people,” thus making populists out to be elitists.

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job creators

rhetorical claim: eliminate regulations protecting workers, consumers and the environment are job-creation measures. This is just trickle-down economics in another form: Whatever fulfills the desires of the most-privileged sectors in our society is declared to be good for everyone else. But God forbid that government do anything to help the non-rich directly.

rhetorical effect: as A.J. Dionne argues,

This is just trickle-down economics in another form: Whatever fulfills the desires of the most-privileged sectors in our society is declared to be good for everyone else. But God forbid that government do anything to help the non-rich directly.

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welfare reform

rhetorical claim: Medicaid is a form of welfare, not social insurance. According to OMB Director Mick Mulvaney,

For years, we’ve focused on how we can help Americans receive taxpayer-funded assistance. Under President Trump’s leadership, we’re now looking at how we can respect both those who require assistance and the taxpayers who fund that support. For the first time in a long time, we’re putting taxpayers first. Taking money from someone without an intention to pay it back is not debt. It is theft.

Mulvaney goes on to reach out to core Trump supporters:

So if you left for work this morning in the dark, if you came home after your kids were asleep, if you feel lucky to get overtime pay to support your aging parents or adult children, if you’re working part-time but praying for a full-time job, if your savings are as exhausted as you are, you have not been forgotten.

rhetorical effect: By calling Medicaid welfare rather than insurance, this argument justifies decimating the social safety net by vilifying all government aid recipients as deadbeats, frauds and even criminals. Divides Americans between the makers and the takers, and justifies social darwinism. The only larceny being committed is the GOP taking away social insurance.

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energy dominance

rhetorical claim: America no longer just wants energy independence–we want energy dominance.

rhetorical effect: best explained by Gail Collins:

Remember the good old days when all we wanted was energy independence? It’s a new era and you don’t want to be just skipping along the independence trail when you could be right up there on the mountaintop with your foot on the rest of the world’s throat. Leaders, shmeaders. We’re going to be dominators.

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the war on truth

rhetorical claim: the mainstream media produces endless qualities of fake news in an attempt to overturn the 2016 election results. They have started a war on truth.

rhetorical effect: Trump’s notion of truth is whatever he can get away with, at any given moment, for any given purpose. To Trump, truth is a series of wants and wishes, and is totally removed from any facts. This rhetorical strategy was first devised by Richard Nixon, As explained by Jonathan Schell in his 1975 classic, The Time of Illusion:

But whether the Administration was saying one thing in public while doing the opposite in secret or was saying one thing in public while doing the opposite also in public, and whether it was cloaking liberal programs in conservative disguises or cloaking conservative programs in liberal disguises, and whether it was framing policy that was meant to succeed or framing policy that was meant to fail, the one constant was that it had broken the unity of word and deed which makes political action intelligible to the rest of the world.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, June 20-25, 2017

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suicide by diversity

rhetorical claim: Europe is creating cultural suicide with lax immigration policies. Increasing terrorism across Europe is a direct result of these lax immigration policies.

rhetorical effect: demonizes and delegitimizes immigrants; assumes that cultural firewalls are possible and that cultural purity can be maintained in an age of digital technology, globalization, and cultural change and recombination. By demonizing immigrants, limits who counts as “real” people, worthy of citizenship.

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bomb the shit out of ’em

rhetorical claim: Trump’s America First militancy doesn’t include any apology tours, “red lines” or “reset buttons.” He means what he says, and his actions back up his words.

rhetorical effect: Ready. Fire. Aim, The hell with international law, diplomacy, the efficacy of NATO, the immorality of torture, or the inadvisability of using the rhetoric of “radical Islamic terrorism.”

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judicial pretexts

rhetorical claim: liberal-leaning federal appeals courts have discovered pretexts to strike down the Muslim travel ban. Their ends-justify-the-means ransacking and undermining of the Constitution threatens the balance of power.

rhetorical effect: calling legal opinions mere “pretexts” insures that no opinions Trumpinistas oppose can be taken seriously because they are hypocritical, naked power grabs, not based on constitutional principles. The rhetorical effect is to consider them “so-called judges,” thus completely undermining their authority. Judicial opinions acceptable to the GOP are defended as bring “originalist” and based on sound Constitutional reasoning.

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cultural norms

rhetorical claim: the sexual revolution of the 1960s completely undermined long-standing cultural norms, thus excusing and even condoning deviancy. It also made women sexual slaves by reducing sex from its elevated Genesis vision of human dignity to a mere bodily function.

rhetorical effect: leads directly to abortion bans, the banning of contraception, and abstinence-only education. Tries to establish eternal, fixed “cultural norms,” especially those established in the 1950s; paternalisticly undermines any belief in the equality of the sexes by claiming that women need to be protected from their own sexuality.

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innocuous, incidental and routine

rhetorical claim: the absurd notion that the President of the United States committed treason with the Russians is a Dem fantasy built entirely on innocuous, incidental and routine contacts between Americans and Russians. It is an attempt to criminalize perfectly innocent human contacts that are natural and grounded in Washington practice.

rhetorical effect: trivializes any charges of collusion with Russians as overblown and baseless by attempting to normalize them as “business as usual.” Makes it impossible to make a case for criminal charges because the threshold for such charges–outright transcripts or recordings of collusion- is set so high and is so literal-minded. Dismisses any attempt to prove a discernible pattern of behavior;”connecting the dots” is impossible if there are no “dots,” only innocent contacts. Truth disregarded becomes truth degraded.

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the exterminating Left

rhetorical claim: political correctness and charges of “cultural appropriation” have led the Left to unparalleled intolerance of free speech, and they are quick to exterminate anyone who challenges their Taliban-like control over thought and speech.

rhetorical effect: defames, discredits and delegitimizes all liberal policy positions and language. Treats all ideals about injustice, intolerance and  inequality as intolerant ideology; acts as if the GOP doesn’t also police their own language by using phrases such “the death tax” rather than “the estate tax,” and doesn’t mercilessly cast out any apostates.

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more flexibility to the states

rhetorical claim: under Trumpcare, everyone will have access to affordable health care, and will have a choice of doctors and plans. Trumpcare is pAtient-centered, and market-driven.

rhetorical effect: softens the regressive, redistrubutionist effects of the Trumpcare bill, as explained by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post:

All of this suggests that in some key ways, the GOP strategy is working. Republicans have gone to enormous lengths to obscure the plan’s profoundly regressive features. They have endlessly told the lie that no one will be worse off (because everyone will have “access” to affordable coverage), and they’ve developed numerous cleverly designed talking points designed to create the impression that, by slowly phasing in the loss of coverage for millions over time, this will create a painless transition to … well, to a blissful state in which everyone, again, has “access” to affordable coverage. Among these: “Smooth glide path.” “Rescue mission.” “Bridge to better health care.” “Soft landing.”

As Sargent goes on to point out, the irony is that starting in 2021, when federal Medicaid expansion starts to be phased out, states will have no flexibility because they must balance their own budgets and will only be able to do so by reducing health care for the poor.

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dodgy dossier

rhetorical claim: Democratic leaders in Congress keep referring to it to cook up more charges against Trump, while liberal media continue to use it as a road map to find “scoops” on Trump in the “Russiagate” conspiracy they’re peddling — still hoping against hope that the central thrust of the report — that Trump entered into an unholy alliance with the Russian government during the election — will one day prove true and bring about the downfall of his presidency.

rhetorical effect: pejoratives such as “cook up,” “scoops”, “peddling,” undermine the efficacy and motivation behind “Russiagate.” itself also in  fright quotes. Reinforces the argument that the entire things is “fake news” and a ‘witch hunt”.

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special interests

rhetorical claim: special interests such as seniors, hospitals, doctors and nurses are out to derail the Trumpcare bill.

rhetorical effect: turns the majority into a “special” interest. This seemingly neutral or even approving phrase has long been weaponized in political discourse to mean parochial, selfish interests that should be dismissed. Justifies Trump’s authoritarian pseudopopulism, all done in the name of the people against the “special interests,” “the swamp” or “the Deep State”

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place at the table

rhetorical claim: instead of being obstructionist, the Dems should compromise on health care and take their place at the table in negotiating health care reform.

rhetorical effect: makes the Dems seem obstructionist when they have in fact never been invited to the table, and when the price of a seat is to surrender all of their values and policies.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, June 13-18, 2017

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conscience

rhetorical claim: progressives have triumphed over faith. Now they’re targeting conscience itself. Their bleak vision of civic life does not allow any religious liberty in the public square.

rhetorical effect: makes progressives out to be godless bigots fighting a tyrannical war against religious freedom. By arguing that progressives lack any respect for conscience, this meme equates liberalism with nihilism.

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preposterous Russian fantasies

rhetorical claim: the Dems’ witch hunt is nothing more than a vendetta against Trump for winning the election, and is merely based on innuendo and partisan distaste with Trump. A presidential election is being overturned by an elite consensus across the vast ideological and cultural divide running all the way from the New York Times to the Washington Post. 

rhetorical effect: dusts off the old argument about liberal elites dominating the mainstream media; relegates all adverse Russia-Trump stories to being “fake news” and liberal fantasies. Their logic seems to be that if you say something isn’t there enough times, maybe it will just go away.

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informed choice

rhetorical claim: consumer protections should help people make informed choices instead of trying to dictate choices with prohibitive rules.

rhetorical effect: often used in defense of stripping away most Dodd-Frank provisions, this inside-out logic argues that fewer government regulations mean more consumer protection–that people are more informed when the government doesn’t mandate any transparency or information.

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whataboutism

rhetorical claim: Speaking of obstruction of justice, what about Loretta Lynch blocking the Clinton e-mail investigation?

rhetorical effect: proves effective at changing the subject or creating false equivalencies. Acts as if any question, inconsistency or factual error invalidates an entire claim.

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freedom from

rhetorical claim: The GOP plan to eliminate health coverage for millions of Americans and do away with such essential health benefits as maternity care for millions more is just a matter of good old free-market consumerism. As explained by Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Tea Party Republican, “Americans have choices. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care.” As Paul Ryan put it,  “Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need.” Trumpcare, Mike Pence tell us, is all about “bringing freedom and individual responsibility back to American health care.”

rhetorical effect: Trumpcare offers “freedom” from health care. As Jim Hightower puts it,  you are as free as you can afford to be:

right-wing, corporate-funded ideologues have fabricated a new negative notion of “freedoms” derived from individual choice. You’re free to be poor, free to be politically powerless or free to be ill and uncared for; it’s all a matter of decisions you freely make in life, and our larger society has no business interfering with your free will.

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sexual risk avoidance

rhetorical claim: marriage is the best context for sexual activity, and we need to normalize sexual delay for teenagers. So a holistic policy of  virginity until marriage is the best solution, and also in line with biblical reaching. Premarital sex makes people dirty and incapable of falling in love.

rhetorical effect: makes it sound as if abstinence-only education is a public health initiative instead of religion-tinged sexual shaming. Demonizes contraception.

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multicultural indemnity

rhetorical claim: President Obama was able to do whatever he wanted because , according to Victor David Hanson, he was protected by “the thin exculpatory veneer of Ivy League pretension, multicultural indemnity, and studied smoothness.”

rhetorical effect: implies that any expressed belief in the benefits of multiculturalism amounts to a hypocritical excuse to abuse power. Multiculturalism is thus framed as essentially a con game  based on the quest for power, not on principle.

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defending my honor

rhetorical claim: Jeff Sessions defended himself against “false and scurrilous attacks” because his honor was at stake. Despite Dem attempts to defame him as a liar, prevaricator and co-conspirator, Sessions defended his honor.

rhetorical effect: playing the honor card in this case is a threat, designed to make questioners back off in order to avoid a personal confrontation. The honor card allowed him to either lie or refuse to answer key questions. The only thing he seems to have remembered is that he did nothing wrong.

However, Sessions did plenty wrong, especially in refusing, on several occasions, to act, and thus revealing an either gross incompetence or a bewildering lack of curiosity:

  1. Sessions says that he discussed getting rid of Comey after the election but before the inauguration. If Comey was doing such damage to the FBI, why did Sessions wait six months to recommend his removal? Also, in all that time why didn’t he discuss Comey’s job performance with Comey?
  2. Sally Yates warned the new administration about not trusting Michael Flynn because he was under an investigative cloud, but apparently this admonition never spread to the FBI Director or else he was blase about it.
  3. Sessions never discussed Russian hacking with Comey, Trump  or the Russians. How is it possible that he has still not been briefed on it, and only knows about from media reports?
  4. Sessions never asked Comey what Trump said when he cleared the room to be alone with Comey.
  5. Sessions couldn’t cite any law or policy preventing him from reporting conversations with the President. How could he not have been prepped to answer this most fundamental question?
  6. Sessions testified that he “in effect” recused himself his second day in office, but didn’t actually do so for another two or three weeks. Why not?

 

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, June 5-11, 2017

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nefarious plot

rhetorical claim:  First the Dems tried the plot line that Trump himself was responsible, but with that now failing they are falling back on a fictional, nefarious “conspiracy” or “collusion”  plot.

rhetorical effect: Every attempt to link the players in this drama is called a false conspiracy theory, and every piece of evidence pointing to a concerted coverup is dismissed as anecdotal or out of context. Calling something “nefarious” undermines its credibility by making it sound shadowy and delusional.

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he’s just new to this

rhetorical claim: “He’s just new to this,” offered Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, by way of explanation for President Trump’s oafish efforts to get James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, to drop the bureau’s investigation of Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. Mr. Trump stumbled, Mr. Ryan went on, because he is “learning as he goes,” and because “he wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between D.O.J., F.B.I. and White Houses.”

rhetorical effect: As Maureen Dowd puts it, “The real problem isn’t that Trump is a Washington naïf, though he is. It’s that he brought his own distorted reality and warped values with him.” This Candide defense turns Trump into a useful idiot rather than a Machiavellian autocrat; defies common sense and experience: of course Trump knew he was threatening Comey. As the New York Times editorializes,

The claim of inexperience is but one of the excuses offered by the caucus, compelled by this president’s misbehavior and misadventures to grow more inventive by the day……

Republican officeholders are in a quandary, ashamed of Mr. Trump but terrified that if they speak out his voters will send them packing in 2018. If they can fake respect for him long enough, they might manage to enact their agenda. While Americans focused on the Comey hearing on Thursday, the House passed a bill rolling back Wall Street rules aimed at preventing another financial crisis. And in the Senate, behind closed doors, Republicans worked to shove a bill gutting health care coverage to a vote without a single hearing.

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long-running protocols

rhetorical claim: (see above)

rhetorical effect: turns laws, customs and norms into mere protocols, thus diminishing their importance–as “protocols,” they seem makeshift and artificial, not rooted in morality. Isn’t telling the truth one of our “long-running protocols?”

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foreign policy arena

rhetorical claim: H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, Mr Trump’s advisers on security and economics, have recently written that: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, non-governmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.”

rhetorical effect: this Hobbesian view of all against all makes life sound like a Roman gladiatorial circus. As Martin Wolfe puts it in The Financial Times:

The US abandoned such a 19th-century view of international relations after it ended so catastrophically in the 20th. In its place came the ideas, embedded in the institutions it created and the alliances it formed, that values matter as well as interests and responsibilities, as well as benefits. Above all, the earth is not just an arena. It is our shared home. It does not belong to one nation, even such a powerful one. Looking after the planet is the moral responsibility of all.

The US cannot be made “great” by rejecting global responsibility and embracing coal. That is atavistic. Mr Trump’s appeal to irrationality, xenophobia and resentment is frightening.

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equivocation fallacy

rhetorical claim: since there are no substantiated allegations in the Trump-Russia probe, the Dems are having to fall back on the false equivocation fallacy that talking with the Russians after the election is tantamount to colluding with them and fixing the election.

rhetorical effect: part of the p.r.campaign to completely exonerate Trump and make the whole thing go away; attempts to limit any Trump culpability to overt, specific threats to Comey if he didn’t end the investigation; accuses the Dems of equivocating because they don’t have any evidence.

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freedom

rhetorical claim: Freedom–of people, minds and markets–is the solution to our vexing social and economic problems, not their cause.

rhetorical effect: equates freedom from constraints–on speech, behavior, markets–with freedom to do anything in the name of freedom. For example, free markets are often the cause of problems–price-fixing, discrimination, shoddy products, consumer frauds–and not their solution. This “freedom” mantra is a Hobbesian view of mankind–all against all. Offers no vision of community or values other than the lack of constraints.

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frustration

rhetorical claim: President Trump is said to be getting increasingly frustrated at the slowness of the courts and bureaucracies to implement his political and economic agenda.

rhetorical effect: As explained by Greg Sargent in The Washington Post:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University who writes extensively on authoritarianism and Italian fascism, told me that a discernible trait of authoritarian and autocratic rulers is ongoing “frustration” with the “inability to make others do their bidding” and with “institutional and bureaucratic procedures and checks and balances.”

“Trump doesn’t respect democratic procedure and finds it to be something that gets in his way,” Ben-Ghiat said. “The blaming of others is very typical of autocrats, because they have difficulty listening to a reality that doesn’t coincide with their version of it. It’s part of the authoritarian temperament to blame others when things aren’t working.”

Trump expects independent officials “to behave according to personal loyalty, as opposed to following the rules,” added Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University who wrote “On Tyranny,” a book of lessons from the 20th century. “For Trump, that is how the world is supposed to work. Trump doesn’t understand that in the world there might truly be laws and rules that constrain a leader.”

Snyder noted that authoritarian tendencies often go hand in hand with impatience at such constraints. “You have to have morality and a set of institutions that escape the normal balance of administrative practice,” Snyder said. “You have to be able to lie all the time. You have to have people around you who tell you how wonderful you are all the time. You have to have institutions which don’t follow the law and instead follow some kind of law of loyalty.”

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sneering liberal elites

rhetorical claim: sneering liberal elites are suddenly talking about ways to attract Trump voters back to the Democrats, but in doing so continue to condescend to working, religious-minded, gun-totting Americans. The modern American progressive has no faith in the democratic process because he has no trust in the American people. Progressives consider all political opponents to be oppressors.

rhetorical effect: defending progressive values and policy positions against Trump-style autocratic populism is vilified as condescending and inherently discriminatory. In other words, in accusing the progressives of elitist identity politics, the GOP itself engages in essentialized identity politics, considering all  progressives to be elitists.

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coddling Islamists

rhetorical claim: we must end the political coddling of so-called soft Islamic groups and imams who treat candor about the Islamist threat as anti-Muslim or refuse to identify radicals in their midst. This coddling also extends to opposition to NSA metadata gathering and surveillance, which must be stepped up, not curtailed for politically correct but irrelevant “civil rights” reasons.

rhetorical effect: paves the way for the segregation–even quarantining and interning–all Muslims. Creates the internal logic for religious discrimination.

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coal and mining jobs

rhetorical claim: Trump has already created 50,000 coal and mining jobs as part of Making America Great Again.

rhetorical effect: this talking point makes it sound as if coal is making an unprecedented comeback, whereas, in reality, as argued in the Washington Post, almost all the new jobs in “coal and mining” come in oil production and infrastructure. Only about 1,000 of these 50,000 jobs are in the coal industry. The truth is that nearly every administration statement about the economy either misrepresents the facts or just makes them up. Nothing should be taken at face value.

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carbon taxes

rhetorical claim: Paris Accord taxes on carbon emissions would cripple US industry and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Innovation and the free market will solve climate issues, not government policy.

rhetorical effect: makes any proposed environmental regulatory policy sound unpatriotic and economically suicidal. They never explain, though, why the magic of the free market can’t assert itself even in the face of a modest carbon tax–why it only seems to work when the GOP gets its way on everything.

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America First

rhetorical claim: in abrogating the Paris Accord, President Trump is taking an “America First” approach: we won’t be bullied by other nations, globalist lobbyists, elitist climate alarmists, or other who want to tear down American power.

rhetorical effect: Best explained by E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post:

The problem with “America First” is that it describes an attitude, not a purpose. It substitutes selfishness for realism.

It implies that nations can go it alone, that we stand for nothing beyond our immediate self-interest, and that we should give little thought to how the rest of humanity thinks or lives. It suggests that if we are strong enough, we can prosper no matter how much chaos, disorder or injustice surrounds us.

America First leads to the diplomacy of narcissism, to use what has become a loaded word in the Trump era. And narcissism is as unhealthy for nations as it is for people.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, June 1-4, 2017

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privatizing infrastructure

rhetorical claim: Transferring government assets to private parties will lead to new efficiencies in roads, bridges, airports, waterways, etc. Eliminating onerous government regulatory oversight and burdensome environmental reviews will lead to millions of new jobs. .

rhetorical effect: Russian oligarchs amassed their fortunes when government assets were transferred to private parties at bargain-basement prices by a regime based on cronyism. The tax savings from eliminating these programs from the federal budget will be more than offset by tolls on using roads, airports, maybe even water systems.

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total authority

rhetorical claim: just as Trump says he gives the military “total authority” over decisions to use US force abroad, he deserves the right to get his way in domestic matters as well because he won the election in a landslide.

rhetorical effect: as argued by Masha Gessen:

Mr. Trump has admitted that being president is harder than he thought. He does not, however, appear to be humbled by this discovery. More likely, he is, in keeping with his understanding of politics, resentful because his opponents — his predecessor, the elites, the establishment — have made things so complicated. If they had not, things would be as he thinks they should be: One man would give orders, and they would be carried out. He would not have to deal with recalcitrant legislators or, worse, meddlesome investigators. One nation, with the biggest bombs in the world, would dominate every other country and would not have to concern itself with the endlessly intricate relationships among and between all those other countries. The United States would run like a business, an old-fashioned top-down company of the sort Mr. Trump used to run, the kind of company managed through the sheer exertion of power.

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Pittsburgh, Not Paris

rhetorical claim: In dropping out of the Paris Accord, Trump has put America first, again. We will no longer be taken advantage of by other nations, who were laughing at us because they had no intention of cutting their own emissions.  As Trump put it in his Rose Garden speech, “At what point does America get demeaned?”

rhetorical effect: strengthens the pernicious myth that the New World Order–particularly the Europeans–are a vast socialist conspiracy aimed at undermining US interests. Also plays to his crucial midwestern political base, who feel sucker-punched by everyone–the Democrats, the Deep State, the EU, etc. “Fortress America” is reborn and re-energized.

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the foreign arena

rhetorical claim: According to Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster, “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it”.

rhetorical effect: replaces a somewhat benign view of the world as a mutual cooperation society to a starkly Darwinian Thunder Dome of unvarying competition. Ridicules the whole idea of community, and equates military strength with moral strength. Argues that selfishness is the main driver of human affairs. As David Brooks argues,

In the essay, McMaster and Cohn make explicit the great act of moral decoupling woven through this presidency. In this worldview, morality has nothing to do with anything. Altruism, trust, cooperation and virtue are unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all against all. Everything is about self-interest.

We’ve seen this philosophy before, of course. Powerful, selfish people have always adopted this dirty-minded realism to justify their own selfishness. The problem is that this philosophy is based on an error about human beings and it leads to self-destructive behavior in all cases.

The error is that it misunderstands what drives human action. Of course people are driven by selfish motivations — for individual status, wealth and power. But they are also motivated by another set of drives — for solidarity, love and moral fulfillment — that are equally and sometimes more powerful.

People are wired to cooperate. Far from being a flimsy thing, the desire for cooperation is the primary human evolutionary advantage we have over the other animals……

Realist leaders like Trump, McMaster and Cohn seek to dismiss this whole moral realm. By behaving with naked selfishness toward others, they poison the common realm and they force others to behave with naked selfishness toward them.

By treating the world simply as an arena for competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, friendship and loyalty that all nations need when times get tough.

By looking at nothing but immediate material interest, Trump, McMaster and Cohn turn America into a nation that affronts everybody else’s moral emotions. They make our country seem disgusting in the eyes of the world.

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the Resistance

rhetorical claim: federal appeals courts defying Trump administration policies are a holdover from the Obama tyranny, in effect serving as “the Resistance,” and punishing the American people for having voted for the wrong presidential candidate.

rhetorical effect: paves the way for courts to become complete political lackeys, as in a banana republic; undermines judicial independence and separation of powers; equates winning the electoral college with a mandate to silence judicial dissent.

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populism

rhetorical claim: Donald Trump represents the authority of the people. As the first truly populist President, he must battle the “deep state” constantly.

rhetorical effect: disguises Trump’s plutopopulism.

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disability-welfare state

rhetorical claim: like the Deep State, the disability-welfare state will do everything it can to resist Trump. This permanent state of dependence serves as a de facto guaranteed annual income to millions of takers.

rhetorical effect: shames people with disabilities, accusing them of fraud; makes any social service programs seem hypocritical and wasteful; provides an enemy to take pot shots at.

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undue burden

rhetorical claim: as is the case with Dodd-Frank, or the fiduciary bill, government over-regulation stifles economic freedom, innovation, and growth. This undue burden on capitalism shackles American prosperity.

rhetorical effect: likens any federal regulation of the private sector to a burden rather than a safeguard. Decides what is “undue,” but never explains that calculus. After all, is there any “due” burden in the mind of the GOP?

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climate alarmism

rhetorical claim: As argued in The American Thinker:

The climate agenda is much bigger than it seems; it moves hundreds of billions of dollars annually and demands trillions. In the ’90s, the science wasn’t settled regarding the numerical values of the effect of human-emitted infrared active gases and particulates.  But there has never been evidence justifying alarm.  Today, the science is settled against climate alarmism.  Throughout history, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has been much higher than it is today or is expected to be in the foreseeable future, yet life has thrived.  Carbon dioxide is the product of human breath and essential for plant survival.  The global temperature trends over the last hundred years show no correlation with carbon dioxide concentration.  The alarmist denial of this basic scientific knowledge makes the climate agenda an effective weapon of mass social destruction.

At long last, we finally have a president who is willing and able to abolish climate alarmism in America. The climate agenda must be renounced for its scientific invalidity.  All the economic and political reasons to reject it remain in force, but invoking them tempts European politicians to engage in virtue-signaling and ritual scapegoating of the U.S.

Climate alarmism will not simply fade away.  Something receiving hundreds of billions of dollars annually cannot fade away.  Besides, very powerful political forces have tied their destiny to climate alarmism.  In the U.S., these forces include Big Green, the mis-educational complex, and possibly even the Democratic Party.  Abroad, most of the European political establishment is on the hook.  Together, they wield a lot of power and know how to use it.  On the other hand, a mere renouncement by the U.S. government would deliver a knockout to climate alarmism.  Abandoning the unratified Paris agreement would be a small step in the right direction.

rhetorical effect: In the name of corporate profits and deregulation, their distortions cover over the big lie that the market and technology will solve any environmental crisis. They perpetuate this lie by ridiculing climate change scientific researchers as “purported” scientists; likening environmental concerns to a giant conspiracy theory; calling any climate change press coverage “media hysteria”; claiming that there is no such thing as “settled science”, and making environmentalists out to be either fools,  con artists or part of a conspiracy of “global activists.”

 

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, May 27-31, 2017

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Orwellian language change alert:

According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration is rapidly transforming (or “rebranding”) official government language on websites and policy documents:

“Climate change” is out. “Resilience” is in. “Victims of domestic violence” are now “victims of crime.” Foreign aid for refu­gee rights has become aid to protect “national security.” “Clean energy investment” has been transformed into just plain “energy” investment….The Environmental Protection Agency has shifted from enacting climate change regulations to reversing them, while the Energy Department has moved from boosting prospects for renewable energy to promoting President Trump’s fossil fuel-focused agenda. The Trump State Department is aiming to cut spending on diplomacy and foreign aid, and the Agriculture Department has backed away from Obama-era rules to ensure healthy school lunches. Domestic violence is now called “crime.”

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soft power

rhetorical claim: “America First” means leading from a position of strength, not Obama’s soft power approach of “leading from behind.” Military strength is more important than diplomatic niceties or multilateral trade deals that are bad for America.

rhetorical effect: As explained by Martin Wolf:

Mr Trump seems to prefer autocrats to today’s western Europeans. He is warm towards Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, not to mention Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He appears to care not at all about democracy or human rights. Neither does he seem committed to the mutual defence principles of Nato.

Mr Trump’s “alt- right” supporters see not a divide between the democracies and the despotisms; but rather between social progressives and globalists, whom they despise, and social traditionalists and nationalists, whom they support. For them, western Europeans are on the wrong side: they are enemies, not friends.
Now consider the west and, above all, the US in the world. The rise of China has reduced its economic and political weight. A recent history of failed wars and financial crises has savaged its leaders’ credibility. The choice of Mr Trump, a man so signally lacking in the virtues, abilities, knowledge and experience to be expected of a president, has further damaged the attractions of the democratic system. Now the west seems deeply divided internally too.

Across the world, people question the future role of the US. Would it not be wiser, they wonder, to move closer to China? Mr Trump would not appear to mind if this did happen. He voluntarily withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aimed at being an alternative to Chinese leadership. Under him, the US seems to be abandoning the notion of soft power. Indeed, the proposed budget tells us that the administration sees the idea as largely empty: guns matter, diplomacy does not.

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Medicaid enhancements

rhetorical claim Medicaid for all Americans will be bigger and more beautiful than ever before.  States and insurance companies will have the flexibility to offer a variety of plans and coverages, and the market will finally be allowed to sort itself out.

rhetorical effect: Serves as a counter-factual claim to cover over the $800 billion and $1.4 trillion in future Medicaid spending over 10 years. Ideal use of a smokescreen: our cuts are not really cuts, but increased discretionary power for the states to make health care better in their local context and for insurance companies to offer bare-bones policies.

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single payer fantasies

rhetorical claim: California is leading the new crusade to mandate universal, single-payer heath care reform. This proves two things: that liberals’ only response to government failure is more government, and that their Platonic ideal of health care is everything for everyone all the time. This approach will bankrupt the state.

rhetorical effect: makes any single-payer argument sound unreasonable and utopian, even though Medicare is successful; justifies limited coverage plans.

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we are not here to lecture

rhetorical claim: in Saudi Arabia recently, Trump said:

“America is a sovereign nation, and our first priority is always the safety and security of our citizens. We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.”

rhetorical effect: De-emphasizes human rights as a mainstay of US foreign policy; allows autocratic states such as Russia, Turkey, China and Hungary to trample human rights with near impunity; makes any moral standard of defending human rights out to be a prissy or hypocritical “lecture” instead of a statement of principle.

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rights-of-man mantra

rhetorical claim: We have a big problem with Islam, and it’s impossible to solve it through globalist, individualist, rights-of-man mantras. Islam is a rigid, authoritative religion demanding unquestioning submission. By rejecting both the nation state and Judeo-Christianity, Liberals have destroyed the main forms of communion, opening the way to radical Islam to fill the void.

rhetorical effect: privileges nationalism over globalism and human rights; makes universal human rights values sound fatuous and dangerous; paints islam as a religion of hate and intolerance, thus justifying Muslim travel bans, workplace discrimination against Muslims, and violation of Muslims’ civil rights. Calling human rights a mantra makes it sound like a cult.

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anti-Trump leakers

rhetorical claim: the real (and only)  Russian-Trump scandal is going to prove to be that the anti-Trump leakers of false stories of collusion were either consciously or unwittingly working for the Russians. Mueller’s main investigation should be into leaks, not a phantom chase for non-existent Trump campaign “collusion.” The media who pass along these fake leaks are profoundly stupid and naive about how they are being manipulated by the Russians.

rhetorical effect: turns any press criticism of Trump or any aggressive news coverage into treason because it is all supposedly being directed by the Russians; plays into the “the press is the enemy of the people” meme; changes the subject from the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia into the media’s collusion with Russia.

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moral and just

rhetorical claim: mandatory minimum prison sentences and three strikes rules are moral and just, according to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

rhetorical effect: paves the way for the return of the failed War on Drugs. Ensures that the African-American male population will continue to face mass incarceration, with its attendant stripping of all human rights and voting rights. Falsely equates morality with justice, justice with punishment, and cruelly long prison sentences for effective crime reduction.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, May 19-26, 2017.

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libertarian America

rhetorical claim: America is a land of free individuals responsible for their own fate. The dynamism of the free market and personal freedom and responsibility produce consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, and taxpayers.

rhetorical effect: precludes any discussion of citizenship, compassion, collectivity, environmentalism, or human rights.

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Fortress America

rhetorical claim: “America First”!  The country has lost its traditional identity because of contamination and weakness — the contamination of others, foreigners, immigrants, Muslims; the weakness of elites who have no allegiance to the country because they’ve been globalized.

rhetorical effect: This backward-looking and pessimistic narrative has contempt for democratic norms and liberal values, and it justifies autocracy and prejudice.  It personalizes power, routinizes corruption and destabilizes the very idea of objective truth.”

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demonize

rhetorical claim: the Dump Trump Dems reflexively attack health care and tax reform bills in order to continue their scorched earth policy of villification and demonization of all things Trump and GOP. They will accept nothing less than Trump’s removal from office.

rhetorical effect: turns any criticism into a threat and a deliberate distortion and exaggeration. Makes the Dems sound like one-dimensional sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome. This projection of their own Total War strategy unto the Dems is an attempt to make themselves seem to be the reasonable and accommodating party instead of the callous, cruel, and conspiratorial party that they have turned into. . Makes any agreement with the Dems politically radioactive.

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Tax Payer First Budget

rhetorical claim: to quote White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney:

If I had sort of a subtitle for this budget, it would be the Taxpayer First Budget. This is I think the first time in a long time that an administration has written a budget through the eyes of the people who are actually paying the taxes. So often in Washington I think we look only on the recipient side: How does the budget affect those who either receive or don’t receive benefits?…Can I ask somebody, a family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to pay tax money to the government so that I can do X?…“We’re no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but by the number of people we help get off of those programs,” said Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, describing massive safety-net program cuts that would not “help” people “get off” safety net programs so much as eject them violently and immediately, regardless of where they land.

rhetorical effect: distorts reality in a number of ways:

  1.  assumes that anyone getting social safety net aid is not paying taxes.
  2. assumes that merely cutting social safety net programs will eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse without specifying how this will be accomplished.
  3. Applies that government programs Trump voters like–the military, Social Security, Medicare–aren’t really government programs at all.
  4. assumes that scapegoating the poor for federal budget deficits will fool people into accepting massive tax cuts for the rich.
  5.  Republicans only propose massive safety net cuts when the people they’re victimizing don’t have enough political power to fight back.
  6. massive safety-net program cuts will not “help” people “get off” safety net programs so much as eject them violently and immediately, regardless of where they land.
  7. As Catherine Rampell argues in The Washington Post,

    Trumponomics — like Ryanonomics — is based on the principle that living in poverty doesn’t suck quite enough. That is, more people would be motivated to become rich if only being poor weren’t so much fun. The political ideology is reflected in major cuts to anti-poverty programs and the social safety net, all in the name of not “discourag[ing] able-bodied adults from working.” And so, with the “compassionate” goal of making the poor a little less comfortable and a little more motivated, this budget savages nearly every anti-poverty program you can imagine.

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unapologetic

rhetorical claim: President Trump’s unapologetic foreign policy puts America first. Unlike Obama, Trump wastes no time blaming America or making excuses for our adversaries. Trump also offers safety for the entire civilized world.

rhetorical effect: implies that anyone opposing Trump is uncivilized and on the side of the terrorist, and that you either love America or are cast out as an evil adversary. Being American once again means you never have to apologize. In this hypermasculinized world, apology is tantamount to weakness and surrender.

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voluntary exchanges

rhetorical claim: a thriving free market relies on voluntary exchanges between willing parties, and rests on the assumption that customers know best what is good for them and their families. In a truly fee market, the little guy is king, and can challenge the big guys with the right new idea. Everyone can participate in this totally free market without the government dictating what they can and can’t do. Big government removes the critical “voluntary” dimension of the free market. if the government would just get out of the way, business investment and worker productivity would rise substantially

rhetorical effect: justifies monopolies, price fixing, and greed in the same of competition. Acts as if markets are not rigged by tax breaks, friendly regulators, monopoly pricing, and coercion. Perpetuates the Big Lie that the free market is any way truly “free,” and that we are all primary actors in that market, directing our own fate.

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cost sharing

rhetorical claim: in the new Trump budget food stamps and other safety net programs will be phased out or put on a cost sharing basis with the states.

rhetorical effect: the only people sharing the costs of these cuts will be the poor. Cost sharing is a euphemism for starving a federal program to death and blaming its demise on the states.

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compassionate

rhetorical claim: Mick Mulvaney argues that the new budget shows compassion for the poor by making them honor the dignity of work and get off the dole. It’s tough love, but being dependent on government handouts is not in their long-term bests interests.

rhetorical effect: Lumps all the poor together, regardless of circumstances or disabilities; makes government assistance a shameful act; accuses the poor of deceit and laziness; defines compassion as the lack of any assistance–in Christian terms, the opposite of charity. As Gail Collins puts it,

Mulvaney claimed the new budget was all about “compassion.” It’s not everybody whose heart bleeds so much for wealthy taxpayers that he’s prepared to feed them the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

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slapping on

rhetorical claim: Obama-era regulators “slapped on” layer after layer of unwanted, stifling, and preemptive regulations in their heavy-handed attempt to rule America by regulatory diktat. A “light touch” administrative approach better serves the consumer and the market.

rhetorical effect: makes any regulation sound draconian and unnecessary; paves the way for massive concessions to private industry.; conflates the concepts of the consumer and the market–as if the public’s best interests are always congruent with those of private corporations. (he old way of putting this was ‘What’s good for GM is good for America.”) Makes the case for government actions that are reactionary rather than preventative.

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liberal media

rhetorical claim: the liberal media are creating a false narrative about Trump, Comey, and the Russians. There is not one shred of evidence of any electoral collusion with the Russians; Comey was fired because he is incompetent and because of the Clinton investigation, and now the media has made up a story about how Trump is either impeachable or crazy.

  • Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for his mishandling of the Clinton investigation and his stubborn insistence on continuing the Russia investigation despite no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
  • The liberal media drove this narrative to take down Trump, who only wanted the investigation “done properly,” and then started to question Trump’s mental stability.
  • The “deep state” leaked classified info to the Washington Post. Plus, Trump has the right to disclose classified information to Russians, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster agrees.
  • Comey is getting revenge with memos that reveal Trump asked him to shut down the investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

rhetorical effect: strips the Comey and Russia/Trump stories of context to make these events seem random or non-existent; makes up an imaginary third party–the evil liberal media–to be the main villain in the piece; creates a false narrative of Trump as the victim of a witch hunt. Stripping context away from these stories allows Trump supporters to make up a false alternative narrative. As Vox explains:

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: Right-wing media is creating coherent alternate storylines with different characters and different context — but a narrative that competes with contextual facts that support a more accurate story. Even amid some of the most troubling presidential news in decades, a huge portion of this country is having a very different experience of these events, and repeating it over and over. Our collective memories — and, in turn, our shared culture — are being splintered.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, May 13-17, 2017

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economic nationalism

rhetorical claim: economic nationalism, especially fairer trade deals, will lead to more jobs, more investment, and greater prosperity for all Americans.

rhetorical effect: conflates economic nationalism with free trade, even though they are polar opposites.

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peripheral and incidental

rhetorical claim: the fake Trump-Russia narrative is fueled by the constant, hyperventilating reporting of peripheral and incidental connections of the Trump campaign and business empire to Russia.

rhetorical effect: trivializes the possible collusion or else nonchalantly makes it sound like business as usual; discourages any attempts to connect the dots.

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one of the greatest electoral victories ever

rhetorical claim: Trump’s electoral victory was one of the greatest ever, and he actually won the popular vote if you discount the three million fraudulent Hillary votes.  He is overwhelmingly the people’s choice, yet the media continues to undermine his legitimacy.

rhetorical effect: this ridiculous claim represents Trump’s signature style: crude myth-making rooted in paranoia and cloaked in the language of democracy and the rule of law.

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opportunity

rhetorical claim: the Trump boom will create unparalleled economic opportunity for all Americans.

rhetorical effect: conflates opportunity with opportunism. Not only are Trump family members and cronies cashing in, but proposed tax cuts will mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans. Trump is the greatest opportunity ever for the richest Americans to get richer in the greatest redistribution of wealth in American history.

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negotiation

rhetorical claim: negotiating better trade deals for America will create greater prosperity and stop foreign nations from taking advantage of the US.

rhetorical effect: turns the reciprocity of negotiation into a zero-sum game with clear winners and losers. Equates winning with justice and equity.

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Trumpism

rhetorical claim: like racism and sexism, the media’s knee-jerk, eye-rolling response to Trump represents an inborn form of discrimination. It’s all about the “feigned pained look, the furrowed brow, the curled lip.”Or comments such as, “That makes no sense” or “You must be lying” that anchors make anytime an advocate of President Trump goes on television to defend him.

rhetorical effect: makes the media appear dismissive of Trump even when they are responding to the substance (or lack of substance)i of one of Trump’s tweets or one of his surrogates’ defenses. This attack leads to false equivalency (call it “on the one hand, on the other hand”ism). Makes them treat false facts and phony narratives as real, thus normalizing deceptions and creating an ultimately exhausting fog of confusion.

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pansy America

rhetorical claim: from The American Thinker website:

Americans have become a wilting, withering mass of weak, needy crybabies who have departed far and away from the strength of back, intellect, and character of America’s Founders, who created a system that none other has ever equaled.  Rather than follow along the path that made America a strong, economically thriving and prosperous nation, many Americans, especially Millennials, pursue petty and paltry pleasures, as would a sloth and a glutton, and claim their slightest whim to be a “right.”

Some things, like food, shelter, clothing, water, and health care, are critical to our lives.  However, they are not “rights.”  Even if they were made rights, this would set in motion a confiscatory requirement to satisfy that right at the expense of others, much as America currently chafes against our current welfare system.

More and more, Americans hear a clamor from their progressive countrymen of all rank and file, for wants and desires to be provided through government funds, the taxpayers’ dollars.  Now, not only do many across the nation demand health care as a right, but they also demand a $15-per-hour minimum wage and free university educations.

rhetorical effect: this diatribe demeans concepts such as health care is a right, workers deserve a living wage, the social safety net. etc. It posits a Darwinian world where the government is reduced to the military/police complex.

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Trump’s “hopes”

rhetorical claim: in Comey’s alleged memo, Trump is quoted as saying that he “hopes” Comey gives up the pursuit of Flynn. Note that he never directly orders Comey to do so. How can Trump be impeached for just “hoping” for something?

rhetorical effect: makes a thinly-veiled threat–an impeachable offense– sound like a reasonably honest wish or feeling–hardly an impeachable offense.

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economic equality

rhetorical claim: under Obama (and really going to back to FDR), individual Americans’ right to personal property has been taken away in the name of “equality” and “economic security.” This redistributionism will lead to the collectivization of rights and then the collectivization of property. Individual rights will be a thing of the past. The current political fight is over the future of the Bill of Rights.

rhetorical effect: turns equality into a pejorative term; privileges property over human needs; reframes the social safety net as an iron cage of fascism.

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misspoke

rhetorical claim: Trump and his spokespersons sometimes misspeak when tweeting, characterizing events or making statements. This is equivalent to a typo, but is seized upon by the mainstream media as proof of collusion or deception.

rhetorical effect: bait and switch: swapping a major sin (lying) for a minor one (tripping up on language, using a malapropism, etc.)

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obstruction of the executive

rhetorical claim: the mainstream media challenges Trump’s authority to manage the executive branch by obstructing his every statement and policy.

rhetorical effect: turns the phrase “obstruction of justice” upside down and inside out by making it appear that it is Trump who is being obstructed. Part of the master-meme to make the media the true threats to America.

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light-touch regulatory framework

rhetorical claim: we need to return to the light-touch regulatory framework of the Clinton and Bush years, where government more or less got out of the way of Wall Street, public utilities, mortgage lenders, and payday loan companies.

rhetorical effect: a euphemism for a non-touch regulatory framework; complete deregulation

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reciprocity

rhetorical claim: trade deals have to be reciprocal, otherwise America is getting taken advantage of.

rhetorical effect: conflates retaliatory tit-for-tat with matching concessions, so, instead of imposing, say, a 10% surcharge on a nation that has its own 10% surcharge on US exports, instead we charge 10% somewhere else in our trade portfolio with that country. In other words, the reciprocity should be impacts from initial conditions, not knee-jerk retaliation.

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appropriate

rhetorical claim: according to McMaster, what Trump said was “wholly appropriate to that conversation” and, “in the context of the conversation,” “wholly appropriate with what the expectations are of our intelligence partners,” and it is “wholly appropriate for the President to share whatever information he thinks to advance the safety of the American people. That’s what he did.” It was also “wholly appropriate given the purpose of that conversation and the purpose of what the President was trying to achieve”—whatever purpose he might have, it seems, and whatever he might be trying to achieve.

rhetorical effect: makes it seem literally impossible for the President to ever violate classification rules; makes appropriate behavior totally dependent on circumstances. Also, as Amy Davidson points out in The New Yorker:

“There are no sensitivities in terms of me,” McMaster said. He tried to return the reporters to what he, personally, considered the “real issue”: leakers. They were the ones endangering national security, McMaster said. It sounded like the coming attractions for the next episode of White House chaos: the bitter hunt for whoever on the inside was talking to the Post.

And yet it might be the leakers who are keeping the country safe. Government officials turn to reporters when there is something that strikes them as not right. The events of this week and last have gone to the heart of what it means to work for Donald Trump. The likelihood that one will be publicly humiliated may be the least of it; participation in policies that are not good for this country is a grimmer prospect. And so is the possibility that we might forget what we expect from a President, or from the people who work for him. It might be seen as improper for a member of the intelligence community to meet with a journalist, or out of line for a national-security adviser to publicly break with his boss. But there are times when it is appropriate to do so; there are even moments when it is necessary.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, May 11-13, 2017

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optics

rhetorical claim: Trump had every right to fire Comey, though the optics and timing of the firing were bad. In draining the swamp, Trump inadvertently created the appearance of a conflict of interest. There is no conflict of course because the entire Trump-Russia narrative is fake news.

rhetorical effect: as Timothy Egan argues in the NYT:,

Donald Trump is the first president in history whose campaign has come under federal investigation for collusion with a hostile foreign power. And now the person heading that investigation, the F.B.I. director, has been fired.

We’re looking for a few good men and women in Congress to understand the gravity of this debasement. We don’t need more parsing about the bad “optics” or “timing” of Trump firing the man who could have ended his presidency. We need a Republican in power to call it what it is: a bungled attempt to obstruct justice.

And the tragic part is that Trump is likely to succeed, at least in the short term. The person he chooses for F.B.I. director will never assemble a prosecutable case of treason that leads to the doorstep of this White House.

calm down

rhetorical claim: when people calm down about the Comey firing, Americans will see that trump was right.

rhetorical effect: authoritarian talk that makes any criticism of Trump seem like hysteria; makes the Comey firing seem logical and inevitable; positions Trump as being ahead of the country in terms of political insights and judgement.

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constitutional crisis

rhetorical claim: In another instance of fake news, the Comey firing is being likened to Watergate and called a constitutional crisis. However, a real constitutional crisis is a trust and subservience to an entrenched, seemingly permanent, bureaucratic government that distances its citizens from ownership of their republic by elevating employees to a status higher than that of elected officials.

rhetorical effect: this “deep state” paranoia gives the right a permanent boogie man, much like The Trilateral Commission in days of yore.

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strands and crumbs

rhetorical claim: the Trump-Russia false narrative is being help together by disparate and unproven strands and crumbs. Every chance meeting, offhand remark, and six-degree connection is exploited and treated as a smoking gun, whereas in actuality there was no conspiracy and there is no cover-up because there hasn’t been proven that there was anything to conspire for and so nothing to cover up.

rhetorical effect: trivializes the investigation by dismissing (though not disputing) every detail and denies its very existence by calling it a false narrative. Thus this is a false narrative about an alleged false narrative.

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slow-growth welfarist malaise

rhetorical claim: the Obama years can be characterized as a slow-growth, welfarist malaise that redistributed money from the makers to the takers and discouraged American innovation and productivity.

rhetorical effect: reinforces class warfare; covers over the record profits of US corporations at the same time wage growth has stagnated. Blames the slow-growth economy on Obama, when it really is a reaction to the crash that happened under Bushie.

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lost in the process

rhetorical claim: Critics of Trump’s firing of Comey get lost in the process when the main story is actually that Trump lost confidence in Comey.

rhetorical effect: justifies lying about how and why Comey got fired; deflects attention away from Trump’s obvious obstruction of justice by normalizing it as just another executive act.

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peddle

rhetorical claim: Trump-Russia conspiracy theorists are peddling a false narrative.

rhetorical effect: likens Trump’s critics into traveling rag dealers or otherwise shady merchants whose goods are defective. GOP claims are never said to be peddled, but instead, are said to be revealed or uncovered.

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frankly

rhetorical claim: used as an intensifier when making a claim or statement, especially at a crucial juncture of that statement. Here, for example, is an excerpt from Sarah Sanders’ recent Daily Presidential Briefing:

MS. SANDERS:  I think it’s been an erosion of confidence.  I think that Director Comey has shown over the last several months and, frankly, the last year, a lot of missteps and mistakes.  And certainly I think that, as you’ve seen from many of the comments from Democrat members, including Senator Schumer, they didn’t think he should be there, they thought he should be gone.  Frankly, I think it’s startling that Democrats aren’t celebrating this since they’ve been calling for it for so long.

rhetorical effect: whenever the GOP is about to lie, they try to soften the blow by saying “frankly” as an aside to the listener or reader, as if they are really being truthful and confiding in the listener or reader.

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whataboutism

rhetorical claim: sure the GOP health care bill may affect the insurance coverage of millions, but what about Obamacare?

rhetorical effect: by always countering any criticisms of Trump with negatives about liberals, makes everything an ad hominem argument against the Dems. This constant attack mode forms a protective rhetorical ring around Trump.

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 corporate taxes

rhetorical claim: the burden of corporate taxes actually falls on the workers, not the corporation, in the form of lower wages and benefits, fewer jobs, etc. Thus a corporate tax cut is really populist.

rhetorical effect: turns language on its head by transforming corporations into populist enterprises whose main aim is purportedly employee welfare, not profits.