Category Archives: scripts

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?

GOP Parallel Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims, and Canards, July 2-8, 2013

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The whole modern project has been an attempt to control the freedom unleashed by Christianity’s dual loyalty, to re-create the conformity to “traditional” culture that predated the Christian moral liberation. What we see today in the success of gay marriage is not really freedom run amok, but the result of turning the power to define morality over to the state, or to the dominant group representing it. “Same Sex Marriage Isn’t About Freedom, The American Conservative 

Denying marriage equality is a form of liberation from state power. In GOP terms, the more the state grants individual freedoms, the more it enslaves individuals to the state. Freedom ias enslavement.
This is why Mr. Snowden remains in a Moscow airport terminal, making demands (via his father) of the terms the U.S. must meet before he returns home. This is also how Russia merrily arms Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria, and how Mr. Assad unleashes chemical weapons on his own people, and how Iran marches toward an atomic bomb—all with little concern for what the U.S. might do.  “The President and the Hacker, “ WSJ.Connect-the-dots exercises such as this  are analogous to magnets that attract everything into a single congealed ,hyper-paranoid field theory.  But, wait, they left out Benghazi!
Modern liberalism, among other things, is a psychological state, in which very-well-off Americans find ways through their income and privilege to be exempt from the ramifications of their own ideologies, while adopting causes and pets that exempt them from guilt over their own status and limitless opportunities. Judging by their concrete actions, they are indifferent to the poor whom they romanticize at a safe distance. In short, voting for larger government and subsidies is seen as a necessary cost of being a reactionary, liberal elite. “Liberal Apartheid,” Victor David Hanson, National Review
But there is another less-discussed reason. The Obama administration’s instinctive dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law are finally catching up with it. Few Republicans in the House — even those who devoutly want immigration reform — trust the Obama administration to enforce with consistency and integrity anything that passes Congress. “Why ObamaCare Threatens Immigration Reform,” John Fund, National Review.So if Obama has no respect for the rule of law, the is he an outlaw? If the GOP really believes  this, isn’t government dysfunction inevitable? This is part of the Machiavellian  Rove strategy to delegitimize Obama.
The basic premise of ObamaCare was the government’s superior ability to organize the health insurance industry.  That postponed employer mandate is the final proof that it can’t.  All of Obama’s projections were wrong, nothing in the ObamaCare system has worked as promised, everything is getting more expensive, and there hasn’t even been much of an improvement in coverage for the uninsured.  Central planning is once again exposed as an utter failure.ObamaCare’s continued existence now relies entirely on corrupting the basic principles of American government; the rule of law must be deformed beyond recognition to nourish it.  The whole deranged idea was never compatible with a Constitutional republic of free citizens.  It requires a bigger government, and smaller people, than we should be willing to tolerate.  Either ObamaCare ends… or America will have to shrink enough to fit inside it. “Trust In Government Dies With the Rule of Law,: Red State.
what sort of nation we are turning ourselves into… It’s hard to see how individual liberty can be preserved with the Feds setting loose swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance — and with half the nation cheering them on. That’s not democracy, or even a representative Republic. It’s mob rule. “Liberty, If You Can Keep It,” National Review.“Eat out their substance”???? ObamaZombies!
his appointees for high office were demonstrably corrupt, incompetent or pursuing a toxic socialist or gay ideology…we no longer see… true conservatives – men like Ronald Reagan, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, men who were willing to stand up to bullies and call a spade a spade…” modern man has been feminized by overwhelmingly liberal feminist teachers who see playing dodge-ball in the schoolyard as the moral equivalent of playing with a loaded gun. July 4, 2013: Can America Recover From Obama and His Fellow Travelers?”  One Citizen Speaking.

 

Glossary, May 7-16, 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, May 7-16, 2013

and don’t forget the four people who died in Benghazi: insert in almost any story about the IRS, the AP, Obamacare, Iran, Syria, etc.  Now the rhetorical equivalent of adding “in bed” to the end of a fortune cookie message.

concerns are rising: passive voice and passive-aggressiveness combined in one opening rhetorical gambit.

Hamlet: Obama’s Syria dithering.

I don’t mean to be negative, but….: a typical Fox News correspondent’s rhetorical move after savaging Obama for a minute or so. This is usually a transition to even more savaging. Beyond passive aggressiveness. See also “concern is growing”.

overreach: any Obama administration initiative. Anything beyond a libertarian view of extremely limited government.

real facts: whatever the prevailing GOP meta-narrative is about any given issue of the day. These are always concealed by Obama, and whatever he says he can never “come clean,” both literally and symbolically.

scandal: anything the GOP finds questionable about the Obama administration. Benghazi, for example, is now always called a “scandal”, even though—like Whitewater—there is no apparent crime.

skills-based immigration:  state of the artHeritage Foundation dog-whistle term for screening immigrants by projected productivity & IQ. For a devastating chronology of how this term -basically a eugenics-based argument-has evolved, see Charles Blow’s 5/9/13 NY Times column, “Terms of Art.”

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards, May 8-May 15, 2013

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We are not only losing the war with enemies whose stated goal is our destruction we are led by a political party that constantly finds excuses not to take these enemies seriously and never has to account for its disgraceful conduct because its potential opposition is mute. The only way to reverse this trend is to mount a campaign to put Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood at the forefront of the political debate and to educate Americans about the real dangers we face. Americans need to become aware of the Islamic-supremacist threat of the malignant designs of the Muslim Brotherhood and of the disasters that may lie ahead because of the Obama administration’s policies of appeasing and enabling our enemies’ evil ambitions

David Horowitz, “How Obama Betrayed America”, National Review.

And fourth, the free breakfast profoundly weakens young people’s character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably — even understandably — assume that the state will take care of you. And you will grow up also assuming — as do Europeans, who give far less to charity than Americans for this very reason — that the state will take care of your fellow citizens, including your own children.

These are the ways in which the Left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts.

Why, then, do progressives advocate it? Because it meets three essential characteristics of the left wing: It strengthens the state; it has governmental authority replace parental authority; and, perhaps most important, it makes progressives feel good about themselves. The overriding concern of the Left is not whether a program does good. It is whether it feels good.

“No More Free Breakfasts,” National Review. The moral rot of the empire started with free breakfasts for poor children. The Left’s “destroy the children” campaign has been unmasked at last.

King said Obama ignores athletes such as former New York Jets backup quarterback Tim Tebow, who express their Christian faith, but was quick to call with his congratulations when former Washington Wizards player Jason Collins announced he is gay.

“These are ways that the culture gets undermined, where it gets divided, and the people on this side take their followership from that kind of leadership,” King said. “And one notch at a time, one click at a time, American civilization, American culture, Western civilization, Western Judeo-Christendom are eroded.”

“Obama Lowering American Values,” Steve King, R-Iowa, on the House floor. All it took was one gay NBA player to bring down Western Civilization.

The result is a paradox. As the ambitions of government in the Obama era have expanded, respect for the institution of government has reached new lows. These scandals add another layer of cynicism. And the practical political effects are very real. Who is more likely this month than last to trust the federal government with the implementation of Obamacare (in part by the IRS), the enforcement of new gun-control laws or the securing of the southern border?

“Government’s Heavy Hand Felt in AP, IRS Scandals,” Michael Gerson, Washington Post. Nothing like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Why trust the guv’ment with anything? This is the cynical nihilism at the heart of the GOP vision.

Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now.

“DC Turns on Obama,” Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, Politico. Oh, right, they’ve shown such bipartisan spirit and self-restraint blocking every Obama policy initiative, sabotaging budget negotiations at the last minute, holding up confirmations for months or even years, etc. Give me a break. Weather forecast: three and a half more years of non-stop hearings, leaks and cries for impeachment. The GOP is governing by negation.

Parallel Universes Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive GOP Claims, Myths & Canards, April 22-27, 2013

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As for due process, the greatest danger to liberty would be to allow more such attacks that would inspire an even greater public backlash against Muslims or free speech or worse. The anti-antiterror types on the left and GOP Senators who agree that the U.S. isn’t part of the battlefield are making the U.S. more vulnerable

The greatest danger to liberty is to allow civil liberties? The greatest threat to Muslims is to not single them out for racial profiling? These kinds of Orwellian logic are Fascism 101.

“Enemy Combatants in Boston”, WSJ

For example: how is the War on Poverty going?  We spent a trillion dollars on that, back when a trillion dollars was a lot of money for Uncle Sam.  Actually, we’re spending almost a trillion dollars per year on means-tested federal and state welfare programs these days.  Our reward for this is more poverty – poverty levels higher than they were in the late Sixties.  Under the current definition, one in six Americans live in poverty… but even the definition of poverty is the subject of much debate, because it doesn’t include the enormous value of those War on Poverty welfare programs, which can leave an “impoverished” family with more disposable income than “middle class” families enjoy.

Does this constitute success or failure for large-scale government welfare programs?  If the objective of the War on Poverty was to reduce poverty, it must be judged one of the most astonishing failures in American history.  Poverty won in a rout.  On the other hand, if the objective was to make poverty more comfortable, by raising the standard of living for poor Americans, the war could be viewed as an impressive success.  Most of the world’s poor live in conditions of awful deprivation; America’s poor wrestle with chronic obesity.

Food-stamp recipients eat better than the middle class? Didn’t this government-by-anecdote approach ride into the sunset with Reagan?

“Government Without Objective,” Red State

“This week, we have reason for great doubts in our culture’s ability to assimilate those who come here into good Americans, and our government’s ability to examine potential citizens and weed out those who would seek to harm us.”

“The Boston Bombers and the Collapse of Assimilation,” Jim Geraghty, National Review.

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right…Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.” (John Cornyn, July 2004)

Lock up your female box turtles!

So does America’s Welfare System create Jihadists in a vacuum? No. But it certainly could engender the type of hatred and contempt for worthless humanity that makes it possible for a dehumanized and brutal egoist to be brainwashed into blowing up 8 Year-Old boys without the slightest lilt of remorse or regret. America’s Welfare system dehumanizes man. Dehumanized men are more likely to commit crime. The Russians certainly told us this was coming. After seven decades under Communist tyranny; they certainly were the ones who would know.

“Does the US Welfare System Benefit Jihadists?,” Red State

The logic here seems to be that taking food stamps “robs” you of your humanity and tips you toward becoming a terrorist.

 

 

When a communist assassinated President Kennedy, somehow the American Right got the blame. Lyndon Johnson translated that myth into a campaign of slander against Barry Goldwater, casting him as a crypto-Nazi emissary of “hate.” After the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton saw fit to insinuate that Rush Limbaugh and his imitators were partly to blame….Occupy Wall Street was an idealistic expression of democratic protest, but the tea partiers are brownshirts in khakis…Barack Obama was friendly with a convicted domestic terrorist.

But to even bring these things up, never mind invest them with significance, is considered outrageous guilt by association. And you know what? Maybe it is.

But if that is outrageous, what do you call the paranoid style of liberal politics that has confused normalcy with fascism for more than half a century?

 

“The Right’s Undeserved Stigma,” Jonah Goldberg, National Review

 

This is a tricky double move. It’s not paranoid to accuse Obama of masterminding a socialist takeover of America because the GOP occupies the high ground on “normalcy.” Paranoia is the new normal in Tea Party America.

the West has imported vast numbers of people who hate our guts and would love to slit our throats. Political correctness has replaced self-preservation. The Boston Marathon killer who set a bomb down right next to an eight-year-old child is only the latest in an ongoing series of such people.

Today, virtually every group has its own “leaders” promoting its separate identity and different way of life, backed up by zealots for multiculturalism and bilingualism in the general population. The magic word “diversity” is repeated endlessly and insistently to banish concerns about the balkanization of America — and to banish examples provided by the tragic history of the Balkans.

We are importing many foreigners who stay foreign, if not hostile. Blithely turning them into citizens by fiat, rather than because they have committed to the American way of life, is an irreversible decision that could easily turn out to be a dangerous gamble with the future of the whole society. What happened in Boston shows just one of those dangers.

“Immigration Gambles,” Thomas Sowell, The National Review

The Boston bombings prove that diversity, multiculturalism, bilingualism and tolerance are destroying the American way of life.

The problem created by the welfare state is thus not best understood as…the illusion of an impossible independence—an individualism so radical it renders all human relationships, including our relationships to the weakest and most needy of those around us, into non-binding optional arrangements, ignoring the realities of human life that make it necessary to guard human beings in their most vulnerable moments through an array of unchosen—or at the very least non-optional—obligations, especially in the family. The Left’s statist radical individualism that masquerades as a kind of communitarian collectivism pretends to offer a way for people to act together, but in practice it offers an escape from all mutual dependence and from the neediness of people who are not well positioned to pretend to be utterly autonomous.

 

“More Than Dependency,” National Review

Statism and radical individualism at the same time sounds like an oxymoron, but Republicans always seem able to square the circle by making something—in this case, communitarianism and welfare—into its opposite—in this case, radical individualism and social breakdown. A moral imperative is turned inside out and twisted into seeming like into an immoral disavowal of social obligation and community.

In just a short time, they would be entitled to the same massive array of government programs as everyone else, including expensive retirement income and health programs that are already severely underfunded. The average unlawful immigrant has a 10th grade education, and low-skill immigrants on average take more in government benefits than they pay in taxes at every stage of their lives.

America’s families are already burdened with taxes to support a bloated welfare and overburdened entitlement system that is badly in need of reform. This situation would get far worse under amnesty.

 

“American Families Cannot Afford the Cost of Amnesty,” Heritage Foundation

Immigrant bashing personified.

Parallel Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive GOP Claims, Myths & Canards, April 12-18, 2013

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In the 2000s, America tried to use a debt-fueled real-estate boom as a substitute for real wealth creation. The Fed’s loose money, government endorsement of private credit-ratings agencies and reckless promotion of homeownership created a housing bubble. The bursting of this bubble created a financial crisis. We do not want to repeat the experience

Housing bubbles are only caused by federal regulatory laxity and easy Fed money, and not in any way linked to private sector greed and deception?

“Can We Afford Another Housing Boom?”, WSJ

Another hallmark of the Bloomberg style is its insufferable condescension. One need only have heard the tiniest whine of a Bloomberg speech to know what I’m talking about. The preening attitude of superiority manifests itself in a form of moral blackmail. Adversaries of the Bloomberg-Obama agenda are not simply mistaken. There is, it is implied, something wrong with them personally.

Opponents of superfluous gun regulations are viewed as accessories after the fact to the latest mass shooting. Opponents of an immigration amnesty are either racist or nativist or cruel. Skeptics of the relevance or efficacy of efforts to halt climate change are “denialists” similar to the cranks who say the Holocaust did not happen. “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence,” wrote Oscar Wilde. That is a fair description of American political discourse in the age of Bloomberg and Obama, when the rich and liberal exploit pity, shame, and guilt to further their agenda.

Obama’s opponents are all either mass-murderer sympathizers, racists, or science denialists?

“The Bloomberg Presidency”. Washington Free Beacon.

“If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted,” Rep. Steve Stockman (R-OK)

The real philosophical question is how to do a background check on a fetus.

One of the dangerous inconsistencies of many, if not most, gun-control crusaders is that those who are most zealous to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens are often not nearly as concerned about keeping violent criminals behind bars. Leniency toward criminals has long been part of the pattern of gun-control zealots on both sides of the Atlantic. When the insatiable desire to crack down on law-abiding citizens with guns is combined with an attitude of leniency toward criminals, it can hardly be surprising when tighter gun-control laws are accompanied by rising rates of crime, including murders.

“The Fact-Free Gun Control Crusade,” Thomas Sowell, National Review. Right, gun control advocates care more about the rights of prisoners than those of gun owners.

Anecdote, the age-old enemy of logic, now reigns supreme and trumps induction — as if the exception is always proof of the rule, as if the public will always forsake reason for emotion. Forget the statistics on Obamacare — my Uncle Joe was denied coverage after he lost his job. The economy is getting better, because my friend Will was offered a job today. Why enforce federal immigration law, when there is no nicer window washer than Herlinda, who comes to my house every Tuesday? It hailed in June here; therefore the world must be experiencing climate change. I would never shoot an AR-15, and therefore there is no need for anyone else to. My nephew is gay, and he’s a great guy; therefore gay marriage is great too. Sally yesterday lifted heavier weights than did three guys in the gym: Presto, female soldiers can do anything that male soldiers can.

“1984 + 29,” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

reductio ad absurdum personified

Nobody knows what’s going on behind closed doors as the current bombing investigation continues, yet media scribes, foreign journalists, and social-media sideliners are convinced: The tackler is racist. Anyone who mentions the nationality of the tackled student is racist. Forget terrorism. RAAAAAAACISM is the real homeland-security threat to our nation.

“America’s Empty Slogan: ‘See Something, Say Something’”, Michelle Malkin, National Review

 

Liberals believe that racism is a greater threat to the country than terrorism: this is how Malkin justifies racial profiling.

“We know that al Qaeda has camps with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border…We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanics when they’re radical Islamists. We know these things are happening, and it’s just insane to not protect ourselves and make sure that people come in — as most people do, they want the freedoms we have.”

Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), on CSPAN

The feds may think $3 million is all you need after a lifetime of work, but that’s roughly the value of a California police sergeant’s pension if she works for 30 years, retires at age 50 and lives to normal life expectancy.

Out in the private economy, people generally have to work longer than that before they retire, and some of them do manage to save significant amounts. We’re talking about people who work for decades and abstain from buying the bigger house or the new car so they can contribute the maximum to their 401(k)s or IRAs. The people who defer gratification and build a nest egg to avoid becoming a burden on their kids or their fellow taxpayers. The people whose savings finance productive enterprise. You know, the bad guys.

$3 million is not enough to retire on? Obama wants to keep people dependent on the state via 401(k)s?

“Now He’s After your 401 (K)” WSJ

Glossary, March 16-April 4, 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, March 16-April 4, 2013

accumulated social capital: everything the “dependency, decadence” and “demographic decline” will undo.

background checks: the camel’s nose under the tent for the intrusion of the government into every aspect of life

built environment: federal government plans to force development away from the suburbs and into the cities (see also, “smart policies”)

continuing resolution: perhaps the only way to stop ObamaCare

economic growth: once you get when you remove “fairness” and “rights” as guiding principles

infanticide: Planned Parenthood

juggernaut: always modified “gay marriage”

grandiose: ObamaCare and taking credit for the Arab Spring

greedy: the inevitable modifier of “bosses” and “unions”. Also, the “goons” responsible for Stockton’s bankruptcy.

inflexible: Congressional Democrats (aka, “Obamabots”)

marriage culture=traditional culture

panic: what the climate change folks are all about

Predator In Chief

punitive political correctness—a totally secular state

the sacred procreative essence of marriage. Without it, all we get is human rubble

Scandinavians: shorthand for godless believers in procreation without marriage or marriage without procreation

self-insulating elite

smart policies:The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of the suburbs, move into small, tightly-packed urban apartment complexes, and walk or take public transportation instead of driving. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/343242/obamas-plans-suburbs-and-how-stop-them-stanley-kurtz

ultimate security guarantor: what the US is and always will be. This is not in any way to be interpreted as a “burden”.

US military: Obama’s cultural laboratory where social change can be fast-tracked without the messiness of dealing with Congress

Frank Rich’s “Dictionary of New Republican Usage”

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Hat’s off to Frank Rich’s seminal unmasking of GOP revival rhetoric, “Lipstick on an Elephant,” in the March 3 issue of  New York magazine. Rich’s accompanying “Dictionary of New Republican Usage” is worth citing in its entirety:

American path. The right way for America to proceed. Antonym: Government path.

1. “We can either go down the government path or the American path. The left is trying to turn the government path into the American path.”
—Bobby Jindal, 1/24/13

Axis of enlightenment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, George P. Bush.

1. “[They] create what I call that axis of enlightenment when it comes to immigration. I mean, [Rubio]’s got the policy. He’s in touch with, I think, the lives of ordinary people. And he’s a very accessible guy. He talks about being a working dad and juggling his own priorities.”
—Nicolle Wallace, 2/10/13

Children, the. The way to talk about immigration.

1. “I think that a good place to start is with children … We’ve got families who are here that have become part of the fabric of our country, right? And we want to make sure that we’re compassionate and sensitive to their plight. I mean, these kids know no ­other place as home.”
—Eric Cantor, 2/10/13

Controlling spending. Replaces “capping spending.”

1. “What angers Americans more than how much politicians spend today is how much more they know Washington will waste tomorrow. A ‘cap’ can be lifted, but ‘controls’ are constant.”
—Frank Luntz, 1/11/13

Fantastic four, the. Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, and Eric Cantor.

1. “While calling them the ‘fantastic four’ might seem hyperbolic—and unfair to a few other politicians left out of the mix—[they] are a pretty good counter-argument to those who think the Republican Party is doomed. Excellent politicians all, three out of four are minorities: a Hispanic, an Indian-American, and a Jew—which sounds like they should be walking into a bar for a joke.”
—Jonah Goldberg, 2/11/13

Great Opportunity Party. Replaces “Grand Old Party.”

1. “From this day forward, the GOP will be known as the Great Opportunity Party.”
—Marsha Blackburn, 8/28/12

Variants: Growth and Opportunity Party; Government of the People Party.

2. “We’re the growth-and-opportunity party. We are the government-of-the-people party. And that needs to be the point of view and the perspective that we come from and that we carry our message forth.”
—Blackburn, 1/27/13

Judeo-Christian approach. The other way to talk about “illegal immigration.”

1. “I think the word ‘illegal immigration’ is a false name. You are talking about two separate issues. One is sovereignty … The media trying to make America feel guilty because we want borders—that, to me, is complete bullshit. Immigration is a separate issue … We should all defend sovereignty, then take a Judeo-Christian approach to immigration.”
—Roger Ailes, 2/11/13

More efficient and effective. Replaces “smaller” in discussions of government.

1. “Instead of smaller government, [Republicans] should talk about more efficient and effective government. The former is ideological language of the eighties; the latter is practical language of today.”
—Luntz, 1/11/13

Prudence. What is required for a Republican rebirth.

1. “Prudence is good judgment in the art of governing. Abraham Lincoln called it ‘one of the cardinal virtues’ … The prudent man is like a captain at sea. He doesn’t curse the wind. He uses it—to reach his destination … If we take the prudent course, we’ll be in good company. Our founders were men of prudence … Our country is worth the fight. With your help—and with a touch of prudence—we will win it.”
—Paul Ryan, 1/26/13

Simpler, flatter, and fairer tax code. Replaces “tax reform.”

1. “ ‘Tax reform’ is about the process, what they’re looking for is the result.”
—Luntz, 1/14/13

Variants: Lower, flatter, simpler tax code; Fairer, simpler tax code.

2. “When it comes to the tax code, we as the Republican Party have to make it very clear: We are for a lower, flatter, simpler tax code.”
—Jindal, 11/18/12

3. “Everyone agrees a fairer, simpler tax code would give all of us more time.”
—Cantor, 2/5/13

Welcoming in. A new kind of Republican tent-building. Replaces “reaching out.”

1. “Republicans want to be a party for every American in every neighborhood in every state … That’s why we must stop talking about ‘reaching out’ and start working on ‘welcoming in.’ ”
—Reince Priebus and Ashley Bell, 2/6/13

Inside the GOP’s Parallel Universes, Feb. 28-March 3

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“The only thing the federal government can do to protect women is to pass a universal right-to-carry law. Everything else is just big government demagoguery.” Red State, 2/28/13, on the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act Annie Oakley’s America?
Obamacare is forcing insurance companies to charge more. These rate increases are coming about “the same reason Ghengis Kahn impregnated women all over Asia. Thanks to Obamacare, the insurance companies now can.”  Red State, 2/28 and 3/1 “Risk premiums” are the latest excuse for hospitals and insurance companies to charge as much as they want to. Is this what happens when the “free market” is really unfettered?
Let’s keep the federal campgrounds open by leasing shale gas acreage in the Rockies Karl Rove, WSJ, 2/28 Let’s whitewater raft the fracking runoff!
“Mr. Obama and his circle divide the economy into separate parts. In the Obamaian universe, the units of the private economy—companies large and small—are satellites orbiting the great fixed planet of public spending. All material and economic life in the Obamaian model radiates out from a central source of public spending.” Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 2/27 Is this a call for the “maximum elimination of the public sphere, as prophesied by George Lakoff this week?
“For each F-22 Raptor not built, about another 20,000 families could receive food stamps for a month.” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2/28 Politiscript irony alert: this sentence can be used by both the Left and the Right. Hanson of course is acidly riffing on Obama’s “redistributionism” and his reckless dismantling of the US defense system.
“A shortage of solar panels and windmills, not impending cuts in the US military….is Kerry’s idea of existential dangers on the global horizon.” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2/28 They get another four years to belittle Kerry—here turning him into a Kerry/Gore amalgam
In 1982, Section 2 of the act was amended to say that the measure is violated whenever nomination and election processes “are not equally open to participation” by minority voters. And equality of participation is said to be denied whenever minority voters “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to . . . elect representatives of their choice.” And representatives “of their choice” has been construed to mean representatives who are members of the same minority. This expresses two tenets of progressivism’s racialism. One is identity politics: Your race is your political identity. The other is categorical representation: Members of a race can be understood and represented only by members of this race. By this reasoning the Voting Rights Act has become an instrument for what Roberts has hitherto called “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”  George Will, Washington Post, 3/1/13 “progressivism’s racialism”: a new wedge argument for perpetuating racial discrimination. It’s twisted logic seems to be that  the mere act of  trying to mitigate disparate racial outcomes is itself a form of racism. It’s like when Stephen Colbert  archly says that he “doesn’t see race”, and thus is free to use any racial stereotype he wishes.