Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in GOP language factories and fever swamps, Dec. 11-20, 2018

Posted on December 20, 2018 by suratsweet

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Trump and that sort of thing

I just don’t know about that

I wasn’t there

Trump and that sort of thing

I just don’t know about that

rhetorical claim: Trump’s supporters are making statements such as “I don’t talk about Trump and that sort of thing,” “I just don’t know about that,” and “I wasn’t there” when asked about the convictions of Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort.

rhetorical effect: distances them from convicted felons; contradicts the many ways they defended these same people until very recently. Weasel words from weasels jumping ship? Pretty soon they’ll be saying they weren’t there the first two years of the Trump administration.

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treasonous

rhetorical claim: Accusing Flynn of treason gets things exactly backwards–the real traitors are the Dems with their insistence on open borders, Hillary and her “lost” emails, and treacherous globalists who want to neutralize and colonize the USA.

rhetorical effect: shifts attention away from Flynn’s betrayal of American values; “otherizes” all foreigners, turning them into nothing but threats to the US. Can this grand, nationalistic conspiracy theory ever be debunked in its promulgators’ eyes?

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the Russia hoax

rhetorical claim: Bad as it may have been, the worst of the Russia Hoax was not the abuse of the FISA electronic surveillance regime for political purposes. Nor is the worst even the patent involvement of our intelligence agencies — and in particular the FBI and CIA — in electoral politics. No, the worst aspect of the Russia Hoax is that our intelligence agencies, including elements of DoJ and the State Department cooperating with the Clinton campaign, enlisted the intelligence services of foreign powers — first in their effort to defeat the candidacy of Donald Trump and, when that effort failed, turning their efforts to what can only be described as an attempted coup against the elected President of the United States.

Shockingly, these later stages of the Russia Hoax have included members of the Legislative Branch who, in the face of clear evidence that the true collusion with foreign powers was that of the Clinton campaign, have worked to delay and to ultimately obstruct Congressional oversight and investigation of the entire Russia Hoax.

rhetorical effect: parodies itself. Talk about living in an alternative universe: while most Americans are now starting to see that Trump is a con man surrounded by con men, his small, super-loyal coterie see every new development as confirmatory of their own Deep State conspiracy.

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the church of progressive sanctimony

rhetorical claim: Tucker Carlson pointed out a few days ago how the already insufferable leader of the Congressional Democrats has recently been “ordained….an archbishop in the church of progressive sanctimony.” For a while now, Nancy Pelosi’s been the country’s expert on morality (e.g., border wall: immoral; abortion on demand: moral). She’s now taken to telling the country how much she prays, and she’s urging others to do it, too – at least that old sinner, Donald Trump. After last Thursday’s televised squabble in the Oval Office, Pelosi shared with reporters how she told Trump she was praying for him and urged the president (whom she also called a “skunk” while ridiculing his manhood) to accept the Democrats’ budget proposal with no funding for a border wall. “In fact,” she said with stomach-turning piety, “I asked him to pray over it.”

When a smug person ends an argument by telling you to “pray over it,” she’s really saying, “Ask God. He knows I’m right!”

Summarizing her and Chuck Schumer’s meeting with Trump, she told the media, “I myself thought we should open the meeting with a prayer, which I did. I told him about King Solomon, when he was to become king of the Jews, he prayed to God, he said: ‘I need you to give me great understanding and wisdom, Lord.'”

King Solomon is Pelosi’s favorite Bible character, especially because he proposed solving a problem by cutting a baby in half.

rhetorical effect: deflects attention away from the growing boycott against Carlson, due to his calling immigrants “dirty.” Also sanctimoniously accuses Pelosi of religious sanctimony, and continues the meme of treating progressive thought as a cult of smug hypocrites. Also obscures the real conservative hit list: Western constitutional democracy”, promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the GOP or Trump administration. Curiously, these enduring targets of the GOP almost exactly mirror the Chinese notion of the Seven Perils facing the current regime.

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Marxist socialism

rhetorical claim: The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the so-called “socialist camp” did not result in the demise of Marxist ideology. Marxism exhibited remarkable endurance. It successfully adapted to a new reality and relocated to the United States, where it acquired a new life within the Democratic Party. In 2008 this virus culminated in the election of the Marxist-socialist Barack Obama, whose principal achievement was the successful transformation of the Democratic Party into the de facto Social Democratic Party. Social democracy is a political ideology that has as its goal the establishment of socialism through implementation of a policy regime that includes, but is not limited to, high taxation, government regulation of private enterprises, and establishment of a universal welfare state.

The elections are a clear warning to America that Karl Marx’s vision; “Democracy is the road to socialism” is poised to be fulfilled.

The Democrats have dropped all liberal or progressive pretenses. They run on pro-Marxist ideology, denouncing capitalism and promising miraculous fulfillment of egalitarian dreams.

rhetorical effect: more stops on “the road to socialism.” Among the many ;lies in thios line of thinking: Dems are opposed to capitalism; taxes are evil, the welfare state will obliterate private enterprise, etc. Sheer paranoia, like rust, never sleeps.

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his base loves it

rhetorical claim: every time Trump flouts or mocks convention (as in acting “unpresidential” with Nancy and Chuck in the Oval Office last week), or the justice system convicts any of his supporters with fake charges and perjury traps, Trump’s base loves it.

rhetorical effect: girding up his base is costing him the center. “Playing to his base” is now clearly a losing strategy, yet Trump is trapped because he cannot now turn to the center without alienating his base. The tragedy of his Presidency will be his failure to transcend his base and unify the country. He has painted himself into a corner and his hubris prevents him from getting out of this ideological trap.

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the progressive patriarchy

rhetorical claim: Even if one accepts the notion that some biological males can feel so female that they essentially are, in some intangible way, women, such a view necessarily conflicts with the feminist claim that there is something unique about being a woman — and that womanhood deserves to be shielded from the encroachment of male power.

The wholehearted embrace of transgender ideology necessarily, and quite intentionally, erases womanhood. It allows biological males to don the mantle of femaleness simply by asserting that it is their birthright. There has never been a more patriarchal claim.

rhetorical effect: turns the tables by claiming that feminism itself rests on the claim hat womanhood must be protected. This argument not only ignores all philosophical claims of equality, but also tries to turn gender identity into a partisan political act rather than a biological imperative.

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politicized academic orthodoxy

rhetorical claim: as argued by Victor Davis Hanson:

If higher education’s increasing fixation on job training is the whirlpool that swallows history majors, the monster across the narrow straits of liberal-arts education is a many-headed politicized orthodoxy, a Scylla that consumes the flesh of the liberal arts and leave the bones as dreary reminders of boilerplate race, class, gender, and culture agendas. In the case of history, few increasingly wish to sit in a class where the past becomes tedious melodrama rather than complex tragedy, a sort of reeducation camp in which modern standards of suburban orthodoxy time-travel to the past in order to judge materially impoverished historical figures or pivotal events as either culpable or exonerated.
The tragedy, then, is not just that a campus of the University of Wisconsin would drop the history major but that the custodians of history in the 21st century lost the ability to teach and write about history in a way that sustains a hallowed 2,500-year tradition. In other words, what is being jettisoned is likely not just history as we once understood it but rather de facto poorly taught “-studies” courses — which sadly become snapshots of particular (and often small) eras of history — designed to offer enough historical proof of preconceived theories about contemporary modern society. The students then are assumed by the course’s end to be outraged, persuaded, galvanized, and shocked in politically acceptable ways. Usually they are just bored, as supposedly with-it professors endlessly regurgitate the esoterica picked up in graduate schools.

rhetorical effect: creates a false dichotomy between discourse about race, sex and gender and subtlety and ambiguity in historical analysis. There is of course no reason to pick one or the other, and the best inductive historical methods make the strongest cse for consideration of what “identity” has come to mean.

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, Feb 7-13, 2018

Posted on February 13, 2018 by suratsweet

squeezed

runaway

rhetorical claim: infrastructure and military spending are being squeezed by runaway discretionary spending.

rhetorical effect: these closely-related terms load the deck in favor of more miitary spending and blame the poor for the declining US infrastructure. Trump never says that military spending is “squeezing” health care provision, nursing home and nutritional subsidies, Medicare and Medicaid and all social safety net programs. Even though the US military is by far the most expensive in the world, it will never be accused of “runaway” spending.

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the dossier saga

rhetorical claim: the whole Steele dossier saga shows that Justice Dept. and FBI to be on rgue missions to undermoine Donald Trump. This ongoing saga is the lowest point in government integrity since Watergate.

rhetorical effect: makes the GOP’s unsubstantiated claims a fait accomplie; calling it a saga gives it the appearance of being a “deep state” conspiracy of epic proportions.

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restoring the credibility of the FBI

rhetorical claim: we need either an independent investigation into the FBI’s and Justice Department’s hijacking of the 2016 Presidential election in order to restore their credibility.

rhetorical effect: Assumes the very thing it wishes to prove and accepts as a given the the Justice Dept. and FBI need to have their credibility “restored.” What most needs restoring is the reputation and integrity of the GOP.

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treasonous

un- American

rhetorical claim: Dems who failed to applaud the President at the State of the Union address were treasonous and un-American.

rhetorical effect: let’s get this straight: refusing to applaud the Trumpster is treasonous, but meeting with Russians to get campaign dirt on Hillary is “just politics.” Trump obviously doesn’t know what constitutes treason, but neither do his core supporters, all of whom would like to “lock her up” or just plain execute her. Also, is it even possible to be un-American if you are an American citizen? Technically, in that case, whatever you do is American. Also, who gets to decide the definition of being an American? As explained by Frank Bruni:

That meandering air masks a considered ploy: As a distraction and deflection, he routinely accuses his adversaries of the very wrongdoing that can more credibly be attributed to him. “Treason” is a word too grand to be thrown around casually, but it applies better to a president who minimizes and denigrates clear evidence that a foreign power meddled in an American election — and makes no real effort to prevent that from happening again — than it does to a bunch of lawmakers who decline to salute him. Their actions are largely theatrical. His are substantively dangerous.

Never has a president been so gifted at projection, the psychological tic by which a person divines in others what’s so deeply embedded in himself. Democrats, he said, were “selfish,” putting their own feelings above the country’s welfare. The man who signed tax legislation that benefits his business empire and spends roughly one of every three days at a Trump-branded property wouldn’t know anything about that.

He doesn’t engage the substance of any opposition to him or investigation of him. He just invalidates the agents of it. That diverts the discussion from facts to name-calling, which is a game that nobody ever wins.

If journalists are documenting his falsehoods, they themselves must be fabulists. If judges rule against him, they must be biased. If federal law enforcement officials have suspicions about him or people who worked for him, they must be corrupt hacks. If Democrats don’t congratulate him for making America great again, they must be traitors.

Soon there is no one to trust but Trump, or no one to trust at all. That’s the point. He’s inoculating himself, and no price — not the reputations of individuals who have behaved honorably, not the viability of institutions that are crucial to the health of our democracy — is too steep to pay.

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a government of laws

rhetorical claim: Robbie Mueller is not following the rule of law because his investigation is based on false pretenses, deception of the FISA court, and the illegal pursuit of a criminal case instead of a national security case, which is the only kind of case he is authorized to pursue.

rhetorical effect: the only “government of laws” that the GOP believes in are the laws that are interpreted the way they like them to be–more broadly than warranted in Hillary’s case, more narrowly than warranted in Trump’s case.

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using our troops as hostages

rhetorical claim: Defense hawks have pushed to bust the military spending caps put in place by sequestration, but more dovish Democrats say they will only go along if there is a corresponding increase in domestic spending. In other words, they want more butter in exchange for more guns. Many tea partiers in the House have been adamant that they won’t accept significant growth in discretionary spending to strengthen the safety net at home, even in exchange for more military money.

“I will remind you that the only reason we do not have a full budget agreement is because Democrats continue to hold funding for our government hostage on an unrelated issue,” Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters at a news conference yesterday. “They must stop using our troops as pawns in a game of politics!”

rhetorical effect: Hiding behind the troops, or calling them “hostages” are not only outright lies, but appropriate the military as a GOP political prop. Makes any increases in domestic spending contingent on parallel increases in military spending, even though the two don’t necessarily have anything to with one another. As explained by Chuck Schumer: “Democrats have made our position in these negotiations very clear,” “We support an increase in funding for our military and our middle class. The two are not mutually exclusive. We don’t want to do just one and leave the other behind.” Ryan also makes it sound as if only the Dems engage in a “game of politics.”

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inclusionary zoning

rhetorical claim: mandates for low-cost housing, often called inlcusionary zoning, actually make housing less afforable for everyone else.

rhetorical effect: another rhetorical inversion, call it reverse axiomatics: social safety net spending hurts the poor; less government regulation leads to more transparency because the market clears itself and values information; tax cuts for the rich are good for the poor, gun control laws will only lead to more gun violence, etc.

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paymasters

rhetorical claim: the Steele dossier was compiled under the watchful eyes of Christopher Steele’s paymasters–the Clinton mafia. No Clintonistas, no dossier. No dossier, no FISA warrant. Clinton should be the one investigated for collusion with the Russians and for using the criminal justice for a political smear campaign.

rhetorical effect: “Paymasters” haven’t surfaced since the McCarthy era, when all Russian contacts were so identified. Paymasters are illicit and conspiratorial, as opposed to being just plain clients paying for opposition research. Making every piece of Dem opposition research nefarious castes their entire campaign as fraudulent at best, and a criminal conspiracy to tamper with elections at worst.

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ideologues

rhetorical claim: progressive ideologues hae hijacked the Democratic party in he name of moral purity, identity politics, hatred of all TRump voters, and a constant alarmism about Trump as dictator, or something.

rhetorical effect: calling them “ideologues” makes Dems sound inflexible and narrow-minded. The only Republicans called “ideologues” are those who oppose any of Trump’s policies. Standing on principle is now seen as merely being “ideiological”–as if principles are just a form of political expediency.

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Anglo-American heritage of the law

rhetorical claim: Jeff Sessions: “I want to thank every sheriff in America. Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process,” Sessions told members of the National Sheriffs’ Association during their winter conference in Washington.

He added: “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.”

rhetorical effect: more dog-whistle racist politics, conflating common law with white supremacy. Especially pertinent to the Trump administration’s obsession with deporting and limiting immigrants.

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the Man of the People

rhetorical claim: as promised, Donald Trump has delivered foe the working American: lower taxes, an economic boom, low unemployment, cheaper and better health care, increased Medicare and Medicaid,and the end of crony capitalism favoring the wealthy.

rhetorical effect: covers over some inconvenient facts: record deficits, huge cuts to all social safety net programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, huge, permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, and cosmetic, temporary ones for middle and lower class taxpayers, etc. As best expressed by Eugene Robinson:

The idea of Donald Trump as some sort of Man of the People was laughable from the start — a boastful plutocrat who lives in a gold-plated aerie above Fifth Avenue, claiming lunch-bucket solidarity with factory workers and coal miners. He sold it, though, largely by cementing a racial and cultural kinship and shamelessly misrepresenting his intentions.

Trump tells little lies all the time. But this is the Big Lie that must be constantly exposed between now and the November election: Trump is worsening society’s bias in favor of the wealthy — and laughing at the chumps who put him in office.