- Obama keeps poor children prisoners in failing schools so he can protect teachers’ unions
- Obama ended the peace in Iraq, not the war.
- What’s good for America is good for the Trump Organization. After all, isn’t one of Trump’s aims to help business in America.
- free market philosophy made Google possible, so Google is hypocritical to insist on monopolistic business practices that hinder the free market.
- Obama chose to try and build a political legacy rather than lead the country.
5 Lies, Distortions and Doublethink in the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 5-6, 2016
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.” (Orwell, 1984)
- There is no evidence that proprietary trading caused or even contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. It all comes down to what you mean by”evidence” and “contributed.” The phrase “or even contributed” further ups the rhetorical stakes. It’s as if The Big Short never existed.
- Federal building and land use regulations have strangled the economy and need to be streamlined and repealed to unleash market forces. (Repealing Davis Bacon would be a good start.) Limiting liability awards and frivolous lawsuits will be a key factor in this streamlining.
- Doctors across America are euphoric over the looming Obamacare repeal, paving the way for a fairer, more transparent and consumer-driven health care system. This health care Nirvana will be the final apotheosis of the free market. In anticipation of this oncoming privatization of health care, keep track of ominous and telltale buzzwords in the health care debate: competition, cost awareness, catastrophic coverage, high deductibles, high payments up front, government-run clinics, much higher premiums for patients with pre-existing conditions, major tort reform limiting malpractice suits, etc. Don’t say we haven’t been warned about what’s coming.
- A prime culprit in the 2008 financial meltdown were affordable housing mandates forced on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, Ben Carson, the designated new HUB Secretary, should privatize public housing, put time limits on how long tenants can stay in public housing, end affirmative fair housing laws, etc. In the past, Carson has said that he opposes governmental efforts at desegregation, calling it failed socialism.
- Labor unions are the primary obstacle in the way of worker freedom. Right-to-work laws are the wedge issue to use to destroy labor unions and somehow, paradoxically, increase workers’ rights.
5 Lies, Distortions and Absurd Reversals, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2016
- Man-made climate change is in no way responsible for increases in natural disasters or world food shortages. Anyone who disagrees with the climate change police is subject to character assassination from the media, academia, and billionaires such as Tom Steyer.
- Left-wing activists, such as George Soros, are funding anti-Trump rallies and campaigns. The American Left has made up a bogeyman named Donald Trump, and totally overreacted to his election. As Roger Kimball puts it,
At least since the Sixties, the left-liberal consensus in America has worked to undermine traditional notions of decency, order, merit, and achievement. So monolithic was that consensus that a sudden reversion to normality came as a terrifying disillusionment. Hence the surreal, paranoid, and tantrum-filled response of the coddled beneficiaries of our society. We think of a mot often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: “To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.”
- There is a morale crisis in the military because of Obama budget cuts that have decimated our military readiness.
- boosting mileage requirements leads to more pollution, less auto safety, and economic ruin. Americans only want to buy huge trucks and SUVs.
- Obama’s climate gestures were purely symbolic and had no discernible effect on climate. His smug obliviousness to the desires of Americans doomed his administration to failure. Fracking and pipeline jobs will save the American economy.
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, Nov. 28-Dec. 2, 2016
consumer protection
rhetorical claim: Borrowers need and want payday lenders, and the federal government should completely deregulate the industry, and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (editorial: “Consumer Financial Protection Rewrite”).
rhetorical effect: the belief that consumer “protection” distorts the free market and only protects the vested interests of progressives. Consumers are best protected by no protection laws whatsoever, since the market always sorts things out.
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Castro
rhetorical claim: to the Dems, a liberator for the ages. Actually, a brutal dictator who killed millions. Dems consider Gitmo the ultimate symbol of moral barbarity, but what Castro was doing in the rest of Cuba was far worse.
rhetorical effect: relativizes the torture and mass violation of human rights going on at Gitmo.
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privatization
rhetorical claim: the Dems’ all-purpose pejorative for everything bad.
rhetorical effect: excuses any private sector, for-profit public works. Pull up a chair and watch how fast the US economy gets privatized, Thatcher style. Roads, bridges, Medicare, prisons, water supplies, etc. will all be run by private companies. Government oversight will be minimal.
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power grab
rhetorical claim: any progressive law or regulation based on theories of global warming, inequality, racism, etc. In the name of these fabricated boogie men, Dems use the law to exercise power, while all the while claiming the moral high ground.
rhetorical effect: undermines any moral authority for progressive causes, reducing them all to hypocrisy or an insatiable will to power. Dems are said to “grab” power, whereas the Tea Party/GOP is said the exercise the will of the voters.
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collective bargaining
rhetorical claim: mandatory collective bargaining makes the government the unions’ automatic dues collector. In right-to-work states, where collective bargaining has been all but eliminated, economies are thriving. Unions, especially public workers’ unions, are the worst thing that ever happened to workers, state finances, educational quality, and economic growth. Cutting back public unions also guarantees that state taxes won’t rise every year. There is a nexus of of public-union donations and government officials.
rhetorical effect: demonizes public unions by making them sound as if their ultimate aim is to cripple the economy and bankrupt the states. This rhetoric never mentions union members’ benefits, and the tremendous gains unions have made for workers’ rights over the decades. This rhetorical technique is akin to only discussing the cost of environmental regulations without considering the benefits, such as health and safety. It’s a form of reductio ad absurdum argument.
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meddling
rhetorical claim: as with school choice and vouchers, any top-down, government control over the choice of the people leads to disaster. Any coercive public policy that runs counter to the will of the people is a form of meddling.
rhetorical effect: attempts to unionize teachers, give more support to public schools, avoid the privatization of education, or set educational standards is now defined as meddling. How long before policies based on principles of equity, justice, and social responsibility are themselves characterized as meddling?
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social justice warriors
rhetorical claim: liberals, aka social justice warriors, champion tolerance and open-mindedness, yet are among the most intolerant of Americans, especially towards Christians. They ostracize and demonize Christians; replace right and wrong with healthy and unhealthy; steadfastly maintain that the state, not God, defines marriage; and consider faith to be worse than racism. As memorably explained by David French in the National Review:
With their trademark combination of arrogance and stunning ignorance, they’ll tear down your faith and replace it with a philosophical dumpster fire, a belief system that’s four parts emotional and physical impulse, two parts junk psychology, and one part corrupted intellect. It’s about desire and ambition only partially modulated and limited by consent. Do what you want with your body and your life, so long as you’re not harming anyone else and have the consent of your partners. Wait, that’s not entirely right. You can harm and kill your unborn child. You can rip your family to pieces pursuing your heart’s desires. You can leave spouses in the dust and children in their cribs if you decide you love a different person — especially if that person is of the same sex. Then you’re brave and courageous. At the end of the day, I suppose, the Left believes there’s really only one relevant rule of sexual conduct: Don’t rape.
rhetorical effects: legitimizes religious intolerance of LGBT; assumes Christians are morally superior to non-believers; makes all progressives seem soulless and morally dissolute, caring only about desire and ambition; assumes social justice is inherently immoral and unchristian, and renews all the culture wars–abortion, gay marriage, even divorce and birth control–as once again fair game for social control rather than settled law or custom.
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banning Islamic refugees
rhetorical claim: immigrants from”jihadi states” should ber banned from the US because of the risk of their being terrorists. Otherwise, you are arguing that the inevitable human death toll in America is the price we have to pay for compassion toward immigrants. Immigrants from jihadi states should have to prove that they are not terrorists.
rhetorical effect: demonizes all immigrants as terrorists-in-waiting, and places all Muslims in America under suspicion and scrutiny.
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regulatory clarity and predictability
rhetorical claim: infrastructure spending will be unleashed if there is regulatory clarity and predictability. The private sector will only take the investment risk if the government gets off their back
rhetorical effect: the overall strategy of privatizing public works and turning everything into a concession (toll roads, airport fees, etc.) depends on massive tax credits to lure the private sector. In order to loosen the reigns, government agencies are going to have to overlook or abrogate environmental, land use, and equity considerations when granting permits, as well as relinquish all oversight. “Regulatory clarity and predictability” has always been GOP shorthand for doing away with government regulation.
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banking regulation
rhetorical claim: Dodd-Frank turned banks into public utilities.It needs to be repealed to unleash the “animal spirits” of the market.
rhetorical effect: Making this exaggerated claim requires the belief that any regulation of the financial sector is destructive and robs banks of any choice or agency. Consumer protection is just another form of socialism.
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a functioning marketplace
rhetorical claim: American health care is teetering because it relies too much on government coercion. A functioning marketplace can deliver high-quality care at lower cost.
rhetorical effect: a “fully functioning market” presumes a fully dysfunctional government and regulatory apparatus. “Fully functioning” means fully unregulated.
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school vouchers
rhetorical claim: a market-based approach to improving the schools, give parents the choice over their own children’s school, and make public school teachers actually teach.
rhetorical effect: undermines teachers’ unions; guarantees the continual decline of public schools via underfunding; privatizes the education system.
5 Lies, Distortions, and Absurd Reversals in the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 1, 2016
1. Infrastructure spending in the Trump era will be unleashed if there is a new era of “regulatory clarity and predictability.” Relief from all regulations is the “clarity” the GOP has been seeking for the last forty years.
2. Trickle-down reborn: massive tax cuts for the top one percent are justified because high earners will create businesses and jobs, and thus “average” workers will see their incomes rise too. Never mind that these income gains never quite get to low- and middle-income Americans, or that the rich will get disproportionately massive tax cuts compared to the average.
3. Dodd-Frank turned banks into public utilities. To make this exaggerated claim requires the belief that any regulation of the financial sector is destructive and robs banks of any choice or agency. Consumer protection is just another form of socialism.
4. “The Declaration of Independence states that our inalienable rights come from God. The failure of the people to honor this reality and to give power to the government instead has created our current problems.” (letter to the editor)
5. American health care is teetering because it relies too much on government coercion. A functioning marketplace can deliver high-quality care at lower cost.
5 Lies, Distortions, and Absurd Reversals in the Wall Street Journal, Nov. 30, 2016
- The mythos of the Wisconsin economic miracle, based on a set of lies, false assumptions, and partial truths. As ground zero for union-busting “reform”, especially public service unions, Wisconsin has shown that mandatory collective bargaining makes the government the unions’ automatic dues collector. In right-to-work states, where collective bargaining has been all but eliminated, economies are thriving. Unions, especially public workers’ unions, are the worst thing that ever happened to workers, state finances, and economic growth. Cutting back public unions also guarantees that state taxes won’t rise every year. There is a nexus of of public-union donations and government officials. Public sector unions’ main job is to cripple state economies, and, in the case of teachers’ unions, insure that public schools continue to fail.
- Donald Trump is slowly building credibility on national security as he appoints his senior team. After all, who has more credibility than Steve Bannon (a white nationalist), David Petraeus (criminal record for breaking national security laws), or Michael Flynn (certifiable wing-nut)?
- Teachers and professors are “unionized, ivory-towered and marinated in leftist ideologies. These “educators” “work to indoctrinate their charges against the virtues of freedom, the work ethic, and self-reliance.” (letter to the editor)
- Educational policies and standards should be entirely left to the states because in states where that happens schools are no longer failing and parents have true choice.
- Jeff Sessions “hasn’t evinced an iota of racism.” Accusing him of racism is itself a “smear.” How long before even mentioning racism itself becomes a hate crime?
4 Lies, Distortions, and Absurd Reversals in the Wall Street Journal, Nov. 28 & 29, 2016
1. Borrowers need and want payday lenders, and the federal government should completely deregulate the industry, and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (editorial: “Consumer Financial Protection Rewrite”). Consumer “protection” distorts the free market and only protects the vested interests of progressives. The best protection for consumers is no protection at all because the market always sorts things out.
2. Castro, to the Dems, is a heroic liberator for the ages, whereas he was actually a brutal dictator who killed millions. Dems consider Gitmo the ultimate symbol of moral barbarity, but what Castro was doing in the rest of Cuba was far worse. Thus the Tea Party justifies and relativizes the torture and mass violation of human rights going on at Gitmo.
3. We are going back to war in Iraq, and may very soon get a second opportunity to win via the surge. David Patraeus is the architect of the Iraqi surge. Yet, one wonders, how successful or sustainable was the surge if we need to start all over again?
4. Trump’s privatization of infrastructure spending via tax credits is the only way to stop an infrastructure -spending boondoggle. All progressive infrastructure plans are redistributionist, and amount to industrial policy. The private sector can be counted on to get it done if Trump runs interference for them in terms of “streamlined permitting and approval.”
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, Nov. 23-27, 2016
alt-right:
rhetorical claim: “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Universalism, globalism, redistributionism, and egalitarianism are the common enemy, as represented by Beltway insiders, academics, social scientists, media pundits, entertainment elites, and policy professionals. Traditional conservatism, with its beliefs in liberty, freedom, free markets and capitalism, is an inadequate response to today’s hyper-racialized world, which is eating away at America’s moral core.
rhetorical effect: euphemism for neo-Nazism, justifying racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, xenophobia, and white nationalism. Messianism wrapped up with Manifest Destiny.
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activist-connivers
rhetorical claim: critics who will, in knee-jerk fashion,charge Trump with conflicts of interest. They connive, via conspiracy and ideological dogma, to demonize Trump no matter what.
rhetorical effect: Renders any criticism of Trump as conspiratorial and self-serving. Invites the question: in the eyes of the alt-right, is there any ethical way to criticize Trump?
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orthodoxy
rhetorical claim: any conventional form of tax, regulatory, and welfare policies is inherently self-defeating and thus doomed. Trump will “drain the swamp” and shatter all post-war orthodoxies. All that is solid melts into air.
rhetorical effect: undermines any current shared assumptions about the rule of law, economic justice, human and civil rights, government regulation, women’s rights, etc. Characterizing these prevailing assumptions as inherently self-defeating is itself to argue for natural rights (and, of course, the inevitability of free markets).
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zeroing-out the greens:
rhetorical claim: getting out from under Obama’s crushing environmental rules will end the take-no-prisoners reign of terror of the greens and ultra-liberal environmentalist elites. We need to compete with other energy-rich nations in taking advantage of our natural energy abundance, while still maintaining clean air and water.
rhetorical effect: makes any opposition to canceling Obama era environmental regulations, treaty agreements, clean-energy subsidies, bans on drilling or mining, building pipelines, etc. seem unpatriotic and economy-crushing. In actuality, zeroing out the greens means zeroing-out the environment. The claim that unlimited drilling can be done while maintaining environmental quality is fanciful at best, and dangerously misleading at worst. Trump’s zero-sum politics–his us-vs-them approach–guarantees a Total War on the environment, a scorched earth policy.
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moralizing
rhetorical claim: Obama energy policies that protect the environment at the expense of energy production are already outdated, and will be quickly erased in the new Trump administration. Imposing any bans on energy exploration and production turns out to be nothing more than a form of moralizing by preening and self-satisfied green elites. In a realistic world, as understood by the Russians and Chinese, there is no room for moralizing.
rhetorical effect: neuters any moral defense of climate change mitigation, reducing the subject to a matter of opinion, with the reality to be determined by whomever is in power. Thus any kind of environmental regulation is a “politicization” of a supposedly neutral, “natural” process. In this world of outcomes, there is nothing more naive and impotent than idealism.
More broadly, the whole charge of moralizing covers over the moralizing assumptions behind the Tea Party’s nationalist, populist, statist, law and order identity, their defense of cultural traditions not shared by everyone.
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civility
rhetorical claim: anti-Trump protestors intolerant sore losers who have nothing but scorn for Trump defenders. Their disruptive protests undermine the common good and are inherently uncivilized.
rhetorical effect: One key step toward criminalizing dissent and defending censorship. The irony is that it was the Fox News hate machine that long ago destroyed civility in American political discourse. As Sofia MccLennen argues in Salon,
Calls for civility are often a cover for censorship. While we don’t want to give up on the idea of civil society, we should recognize that it is often those in power who use the idea of civility to threaten the very idea of civil society itself.
It gets even messier. We also live in an era of mass-mediated manufactured anger. Trump couldn’t have come to power without tapping into the legacy of the Fox News hate machine. What used to pass for news is now just a bunch of angry vitriol that alternates between scaring viewers and getting them riled up.
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repeal and replace
rhetorical claim: Obamacare will be replaced with a totally privatized insurance market relying on tax credits, savings accounts, competition, and caps on liability payouts.
rhetorical effect: covers over the fact that the new Ryancare (or Trumpcare) will offer restrictive, watered-down policies that will leave millions in bankruptcy or with no coverage at all. Just because the ACA has been replaced doesn’t mean it’s been improved.
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patriotism
rhetorical claim: to the progressives, the very idea of borders and national interests is reactionary and inherently racist. The New Globalization will lead to the eclipse of America.
rhetorical effect: renders any criticism of American power unpatriotic. This is the way the Tea Party/GOP takes ownership of the word.
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cosmopolitan broad-mindedness:
rhetorical claim: the identity politics of the contemporary Left is counterproductive, standing in the way of a genuine liberalism of principle and cosmopolitan broad-mindedness. Their implacable intolerance, all in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism, is steadily marginalizing the Dems
rhetorical effect: Makes any progressive moral stance on equity, tolerance, and justice seem unprincipled and self-serving. Thus, he only way progressives can prove their “cosmopolitan broad-mindedness” is to accede to Tea Party policies and principles.
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polarizing and divisive
rhetorical claim: when educators and commentators call the election “polarizing” and “divisive,” they are masking their contempt for Donald Trump. The Dems are the ones polarizing the country with identity politics.
rhetorical effect: cuts any criticism of the Trump administration off at the source by equating dissent with subverting the nation. Rhetorically, another step toward criminalizing dissent.
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undocumented immigrant
rhetorical claim: really means “illegal alien.” Dems refuse to use honest, clear words such as “illegal” and “alien” out of fear of offense.
rhetorical effect: “others” all immigrants as illegal and “alien”. A major step toward regarding all migrants as criminals and as permanently “alien”–as if they are from a different planet.
5 Lies, Distortions, and Absurdities, Wall Street Journal, Nov.25 & 26th, 2016
- The advent of fracking and new drilling techniques—the ability to tap untold reserves of oil and gas—represents a global paradigm shift that can reset America’s economy and foreign dealings. President Obama’s willful decision to ignore this was as if Bill Clinton had opted the country out of the internet revolution. (Kimberley Strassel, “Trump’s Environmental Reset”.) This analogy is wrong on so many levels:
in terms of environmental and energy policy: environment-damaging fracking is completely different than the energy-efficient internet; you can’t build an entire foreign policy and economy around extraction industries; oil and gas reserves are a finite resource; even with energy from fracking, the US does not set energy prices and so is still enmeshed in the foreign oil markets; the US lacks the refining capacity to replace foreign oil imports with fracked oil and gas;in terms of overall impacts on human capital and possibility: the internet revolution is a change in fundamental social relations, in how we access and process information and form knowledge, in how we make political decisions, shop, hire people, plan our travel, and generally make our lives easier and more connected. Fracking and drilling represent the old world of competition, pollution, waste, sprawl, and economic nationalism. The internet is about a lot more than making money, consumption, or energy self-sufficiency.
- The Dept. of Education is a “wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers unions and cultural left.” (editorial, “Betsey DeVos’s School Mission). Vouchers are the only way to save failing schools.
- The consequences of checks and balances are unbridled executive growth into every cranny of commerce and society, and a bystander Congress. We have lapsed into autopilot government, rife with corruption and seemingly immune to incremental electoral correction. (“A Trump-Ryan Constitutional Revival,” by Christopher DeMuth). Blaming the dysfunctional government on “unbridled executive growth” overlooks or elides that, from the outset of the Obama administration, the GOP was not a “bystander” but an implacable obstacle to any change or any proposed Obama legislation. (For example, see comprehensive immigration reform, the 2011 Obama-Boehner debt reduction deal, more robust infrastructure spending, the nomination of Merrick Garland, etc.)
- An obsession with ethnic composition weakens America. (letter to the editor). This a a startling claim because until the advent of the Tea Party, America’s ethnic diversity and welcoming embrace of immigrants was considered one of our greatest strengths.
- Climate change is that it is part of a natural cycle, irrespective of human activity. Normal tidal variation explains current conditions–and the hard-core climate change theory is nothing more than the biggest fake news story ever. (“Shoreline Gentry Are Fake Climate Change Victims,” by Holman Jenkins.
4 Lies, Distortions, and Absurd Reversals in the Wall Street Journal, Nov.23, 2016
- The best way to insure that President Trump doesn’t profit from government policies is not a blind trust or divestment, but to do nothing because the public and press will serve as watchdogs, barking at any conflicts of interest. No regulation at all is the best guarantee of regulation (op-ed: “Living With Trump’s Conflicts,” by Holman Jenkins).
- Central bank interest rate manipulations have been solely aimed at preserving self-defeating tax, regulatory, and welfare policy orthodoxies. In the Trump era, economics will no longer be politicized. (Jenkins)
- Obama paid terrorist-supporting Iranian mullahs billions of dollars. (letter to the editor). In fact, the money consisted of frozen assets already belonged to the Iranians, and the US has no interest in financing terrorism.
- Racial (racist) and identity politics are the Dems’ only organizing principle (op-ed, “Democrats Are Obsessed With Race. Trump Isn’t,” by Jason Riley).