Tag Archives: feckless

Glossary: an anatomy of key memes, euphemisms, sneers, and innuendos in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, March 2-8, 2014

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bullying: what Obama does when he “plays” various moral cards: the “race card,” the “class warfare” card, the “inequality” card. Morality is thus characterized as a preening, elitist Democratic power grab.

Carterized: the sad, inevitable fate of Obama’s foreign policy. Turning the US into a “pitiful, helpless giant.” (see below under “feckless, etc.)

dark money: any unregulated Dem campaign funding. On the other hand, Koch Brothers’ money is called “free speech. and even granted personhood.

faculty lounges: the Devil’s spawning ground.

feckless: a Carerized White House foreign policy. Aka, “flat-footed,” “deer-in-the-headlights,” “dithering”, “clueless” and “flaccid.”

jackbooted bureaucracy: mandatory modifier when referring to the IRS.

market-ready: the primary, proper, and very circumscribed role of government is to make the poor “market ready”– that is, make them even more subject to the forces that have made and kept them poor over the centuries.

neutering: what the “Carterized” Obama does to our military.

oppression envy: what gay rights activists suffer from, wishing they had suffered more “systematic, Jim-Crow-style oppression.”

organized homosexuality: the proper name for gay rights activism.

payola: any government funding o green technology initiatives. In fact, the entire alternative energy sector has been reduced to the buzzword Solyndra.

restricting good citizenship: any opposition to GOP state electoral reforms and voting rights limitations.

revanchism: one of several archaic terms taken out of the Cold War archives and dusted off to beat Obama over the head about Putin and the Ukraine. other oldies-but-goodies that have emerged included satrap, atavistic, and vassal state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thinker: Paul Ryan. NOT Rick Perry.

Glossary, mid-September, 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, Sept 9-11, 2013

appeasement: whatever Obama does in the Middle East. He is always either said to be appeasing the jihadis, political tyrants such as Assad, the Russians or Iranians, or the “peacenik Left”.

boots on the ground (botg): one week a good thing, the next week political anathema. The “Surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan were a classic example of “good” botg policy, which the GOP supported until they didn’t. Obama’s threats to Syria were “bad” botg policy.

gaffe : Peggy Noonan’s and William Kristol’s  go-to characterization of any foreign policy initiatives or ideas coming from Obama or Kerry. It was a “gaffe” both  to threaten a military response to Syrian chemical weapons and to offer a diplomatic solution. When every possible response and its opposite fit into the definition of a term, that term may be said to be a Master Trope.

junior camel trainer: The Wall Street Journal’s latest casting of Obama as Putin’s and Assad’s lapdog. (“Obama Rescues Assad”). This meme deftly double-brands Obama as politically gullible and as an Arab. In other words, just an all-around embarrassment and outsider.

leadership vacuum: first cousin to the “gaffe” and “appeasement,” but also carrying its own connotation of fecklessness, harkening back to the derisive meme that obama was unfit for the Presidency and In Over His Head (IOHH). (See “besotted charismatic,” above).

self-besotted charismatic: Peggy Noonan’s latest Obama smear, referencing all of his supposed narcissism, preening, grandstanding, moral hyprocrisy and inflated sense of historical importance.

unserious: one of the master tropes in the narrative of Obama as hapless dupe and preening egomaniac. (aka, “feckless”, or “Jimmy Carter”).