This is the second in a series on how the left manipulates language to advance collectivism, social nihilism and internationalism (the end of American sovereignty).
In a war of ideas, words are weapons. The unwary often fall into the trap of unthinkingly accepting the terminology of the liberal/left, not understanding that happy euphemisms mask ugly agendas.
This lexicon is a map to guide you through the ideological land mines of Lib-Speak – George Orwell meets the CBS Evening News.
Economic Stimulus – Based on the bizarre assumptions that government can spend our way to prosperity and, when it comes to spending our money, the Great Mixed-Race Father in Washington knows best.
Economic stimulus subsidizes the feckless at the expense of the competent, the provident at the expense of the improvident (the poor schmucks who never miss a mortgage payment end up underwriting the deadbeats who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford), failed companies at the expense of thriving businesses, and the productive sector at the expense of the parasitical sector – while growing government.
It’s also a code word for pork, larded with bacon grease. Obama’s 1073-page, $1.14 trillion (interest included) extravaganza includes subsidies for projects crucial to an economic recovery, such as $ 2 billion for a high-speed passenger train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (greasing the tracks of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) and an additional $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (so it can dole out more to those who commit works of art ranging from the incomprehensible to the reprehensible).
There are also billions for the Democrats’ favored constituencies, which in turn will help the party of plunder to stay in power in 2010 and beyond. Stimulus spending is the fertile soil from which Democratic votes grow.
But I digress. When consumers buy products, it encourages manufacturers to produce goods people actually want. When government shovels billions at companies that produce stuff they can’t give away, it encourages them to produce even more stuff they can’t give away – further distorting the economy.
Stimulus spending also sucks up credit the private sector desperately needs, retarding a real recovery.
All of this works like a charm. BHO fancies himself FDR, a comparison that may not be as far-fetched as it seems at first. All of Roosevelt’s stimulus spending (which was a lot for the times) and alphabet agencies, resulted in higher unemployment in 1938 – five years into the New Deal – than in 1933, when he took office.
Community Organizer – Formerly known as an outside agitator – one who rallies a mendicant army to clamor for more welfare, government regulation, and handouts aimed at income redistribution.
Think of them as urban guerrillas with weapons far deadlier than guns.
The president himself made his bones as a community organizer in Chicago. During the campaign, Obama apologists painted a picture of community organizers involved in smiley-face projects like getting neighborhood residents together to clean up a park so kids will have a place to play.
Reality lies in the depredations of the Saul Alinsky storm troopers known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) – stealth socialists who attack banks for “predatory lending practices,” campaign for “living wages” (paying workers more than their labor’s worth – increasing unemployment), disrupt city council meetings, occupy houses to prevent foreclosure, and attempt to physically intimidate municipal officials and employees of lending institutions.
Ironically, following their success at driving businesses out of cities, ACORN now wants them to pay for an “exit visa” to escape the economic conditions forced on them by ACORN. What's next – Berlin Walls?
Obama’s recently passed stimulus package will stimulate the acorns from which mighty socialist programs grow. ACORN gets $4.2 billion in the guise of “neighborhood stabilization projects.”
Progressive – One of the many accolades the left awards itself.
In Lib-speak, a progressive favors progress toward a socialist state. A regressive (conservative) opposes a system that’s failed from 5-year plans to Midnight Basketball.
Support for ever higher taxes and more government expenditures is progressive. Support for tax cuts and spending limits is regressive. A hankering after more regulation of an already overburdened economy is progressive. Those who view the market as a self-regulating mechanism, as well as the great engine of prosperity, are clearly regressive.
Those who believe government should reward improvidence are progressive. Proponents of individual responsibility and merit are regressive.
Enough of such progress, and we'll be back in caves, wearing animal skins and scratching at flea-bites.
Advocacy Journalism – Also known as indoctrination in the guise of information (news coverage).
Trying to locate a conservative in a newsroom is like trying to find a Perdue at a PETA rally.
In the past campaign, advocacy journalism consisted of describing, in minute detail, every age-spot on John McCain, whilst portraying the O-man as a god suffused in light descending from Mt. Olympus on clouds of glory bearing perpetual prosperity in one hand and peace everlasting in the other.
Advocacy journalism includes reporters quoting unnamed and probably nonexistent sources to make their point. Another favorite technique of partisan journalists is using loaded terms like “religious right” and “ultra-conservative,” but never “religious left,” when referring to the National Council of Churches or clerics who favor inter-species commitment ceremonies, or “ultra-left” when discussing politicians like Ted The Super-Sized Statist.
Advocacy journalism is why, in opinion polls, reporters and editors are ranked lower on integrity than lawyers but higher than former Illinois Governor Rod (“How much am I offered for this Senate seat?”) Blagojevich.
Unilateralism – The silly notion that the United States should act against clear and present dangers without the blessings of the UN, Euro surrender-monkeys, Code Pinko and Sean Penn.
Unilateralism is embraced by those with a healthy survival instinct. Imagine that unilateralist Franklin Roosevelt declaring war on Japan on December 8, 1941, without the consent of the League of Nations, Vichy France, Tokyo Rose and the German-American Bund.
The left is particularly keen on making no military moves without the approval of the French (who surrendered to the Nazis after 15 minutes of hard fighting in 1940 and spent the rest of the war collaborating), the Swedes (who sold iron ore to the Nazis throughout the war) and the Germans (who, come to think of it, were the Nazis).
The left believes it’s essential for Europeans, who wet their pants every time the Kremlin rattled its sabers during the Cold War, to now have a veto over American moves in the War on Terrorism.
Bringing Peace to the Middle East – Not content with bringing peace to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1970s and Iran in 1979 (recall which president helped topple the Shah), the left is determined to bring peace to the Middle East, over Israel’s prostrate body.
Jimmy Carter – the mullah of Middle East peacemakers (he got a Nobel Prize for it, after all) – thinks calling the only democracy in the region an “apartheid state” advances the cause of peace.
Bringing peace to the Middle East requires a denial of empirical evidence and a suspension of reason – pretending that Islam is the religion of peace, that the Palestinians want peace, that Hamas and Hezbollah can be reconciled with the “Zionist entity,” that a nuclear-armed Iran poses no threat to Middle East peace (but that Jews living on the West Bank do) and that giving Israel indefensible borders and a neighbor committed to its destruction advances the cause of peace in the Middle East.
Israel Lobby – Reputed to be the most powerful force in American politics. Said to manipulate presidents and dictate U.S. foreign policy in a single bound. Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird; it’s a plane; it’s Zionist-man.
In its most extreme variant (known as the Zionist Lobby), this invention of paranoid anti-Semites is charged with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the Holocaust (to generate sympathy for a Jewish homeland) and the assassination of Garfield (the president, not the cat).
If there is an Israel Lobby, it must be the most incompetent interest group in history (the kosher equivalent of the Keystone Cops).
Notwithstanding that the Israelis actually like us (and vote with us at the United Nations), and the Palestinians hate our guts – they danced for joy when the Twin Towers collapsed and named a square in Ramallah for the first suicide bomber to kill a U.S soldier in Iraq – Washington insists on what it calls “evenhandedness” in our treatment of the victims and the jihadists.
For at least the last 20 years, a Palestinian State has been the guiding principle of U.S. Middle East policy. Were it not for the Palestinians penchant for self-defeating violence (sending suicide bombers to Tel Aviv, firing rockets into Be’er Sheva), this cherished State Department objective would have been achieved long ago – the omnipotent Israel Lobby notwithstanding.
Why is it no one speaks of the Saudi Lobby (an army of well-paid Washington lobbyists and publicists), the Arab Lobby (AKA, the U.S. State Department), the Muslim Lobby (including Saudi-subsidized front groups and Jimmy Carter – another Saudi-subsidized front group) or the Jihad Lobby (most American mosques)?
And now, less than a month into the job, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who once embraced Suha Arafat, after the latter charged Israel was using poison gas to kill Palestinian women and children) wants U.S. taxpayers to shower Gazans with $900 million to help them rebuild after an Israeli operation they provoked. Some Israel Lobby.
Moderate Muslim – One who has yet to blow himself up, plan an attack on a U.S. military installation or behead his wife.
The knights of Arthurian legend quested for the Holy Grail. Spanish conquistadors sought El Dorado. Present day liberals are constantly on the lookout for a mythical creature like unto the unicorn and the mermaid –the moderate Muslim.
Moderate Muslims are like quicksilver, just when you think you have one in your grasp, he slips through your fingers.
Witness Muzzammil Hassan. In 2004, Hassan founded Bridges TV, a Buffalo-area cable station, to “fuse American culture with the values of Islam in a healthy, family-oriented way.”
An upstanding citizen and a credit to his faith, Hassan was upset about negative depictions of Muslims in the media. “The level of ignorance regarding Muslims and Islam is very high in the United States.” Hassan was wont to say.
Last week, the goodwill ambassador for a soft-and-cuddly Islam was arrested and charged with murder in the second degree, in the decapitation death of his wife, Aasiya. Mrs. Hassan had filed for divorced, charged her husband with “cruel and inhuman treatment,” and recently got a restraining order against him. The conflict reportedly came to a head when Aasiya lost her’s.
In a way, Hassan is right: In the U.S., the level of ignorance regarding Islam is very high indeed. Many American labor under the illusion that Islam is a religion of peace, that the vast majority of Muslims are Mr. Rogers with a prayer rug, and that the Koran is the Torah or New Testament set in the Arabian desert.
Church-State Separation – Based on a deliberate misreading of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The words “church-state separation,” “wall of separation” and “intermingling of government and religion” appear nowhere in the Constitution, Articles of Confederation or Declaration of Independence, the latter with its multiple references to God.
At the time of the Constitution’s ratification, and for more than 150 years thereafter, “establishment of religion” was correctly understood to mean a national church, like the Church of England, as the Founding Fathers intended. It’s only in the past half-century that leftists, including leftists on the Supreme Court, have used this fiction to banish school prayer, God in the Pledge of Allegiance, and sectarian holiday decorations – theocratic trappings like creches and menorahs.
During the past presidential campaign, noted constitutional scholar Whoopi Goldberg articulated the left’s position on ABC's “The View.” Regarding Sarah Palin’s alleged theocratic impulses (her tendency to see God’s hand in the affairs of men), Goldberg declared: “I believe that the separation of church and state is very necessary for this country because we’re a country that welcomes all religions, people of all kinds of backgrounds and the minute it becomes one kind of religious country I’m very concerned.” Get a celebrity away from a teleprompter and the babbling begins.
America has always welcomed people of diverse religions or none at all (like Unitarians). The question is: Shall the religion of the overwhelming majority (Christianity) receive no recognition – and shall an acknowledgement of the universal God in a public setting be treated as the moral equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition? To which the left resoundingly answers “you betcha.”
An Honest Dialogue On Race - For the left, this consists of Caucasians humbly bowing their heads and being lectured ad nauseam on the innate racism of the white race.
This perspective is epitomized by Attorney General Eric Holder.
Speaking to Justice Department employees at an event honoring Black History Month (since Caucasians made no contribution to American history, naturally, there’s no White History Month). Holder, a person of color, declared that we are “a nation of cowards” because Americans are afraid to talk about race, in that “certain subjects are off-limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one’s character.”
Wonder who he had in mind.
Certainly not the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., President Obama’s pastor for 19 years, whose anti-white ravings are legendary (“White people’s greed drives a world in need.”), or Obama’s buddy Father Michael Pfleger (who tells us, “white people believe they’re entitled”) or Louis Farrakhan (America’s #1 racist nut-case, who believes the white race was invented by an evil black scientist 10,000 years ago) or Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson or myriad race-hustlers purveying guilt for profit (monetary or political).
A real discussion of race might include a consideration of why Obama took 43% of the white vote (guess they temporarily managed to overcome their ingrained racism on Nov. 4, 2008) and 95% of the black vote. Did the latter all objectively determine that Barack was the best man for the job?
It might also include posing other uncomfortable questions, such as: Why among African-Americans the illegitimacy rate is over 70% (more than double that of whites) or why blacks – who, according to the last Census, were 12.7% of the U.S. population – account for 50% of all homicides (95% of victims are also black).
To ask such questions is to mark one as David Duke’s clone and the reincarnation of Bull Connor. By “an honest dialogue on race,” the left means a monologue – a recitation of the racial sins of white America with no mention of the social pathologies which plague black America.
Population Planning – People control, government action to eliminate “unwanted children,” abortion, contraceptives (to reduce procreation), and sex education, to persuade the youth of America that they can fornicate without consequences.
People have always been a problem for the left. With Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, they had an easy solution – starve the kulaks, put reactionary elements against the wall, send dissidents to gulags.
In democracies, it gets trickier. What can’t be done with bullets and naked force (China’s one-child-per-family policy), is accomplished with appropriations, abortion and indoctrination.
The perfect example of left-lunacy here is Nancy Pelosi’s attempts to justify hundreds of millions for population planning as an economic stimulus measure.
While she couldn’t come right out and say it, Pelosi believes children (especially those born into poor families) are a problem, resulting in government expenditures for at least the first 18 years of their lives – ergo, it would be better if they were never born. Who does the House Speaker think will pay taxes 18 years hence?
When it comes to demographics, liberals are Chicken Little playing hopscotch. Forty years ago, we were told that too many people would bring mass starvation. It didn’t.
Thirty years ago, they told us that we would soon exhaust the Earth’s resources. That didn’t happen either.
Now it’s all about the environment, Global Warming and reducing our carbon footprint. Unlike the left’s other scare tactics, population growth and CO2 emissions as a cause of global warming can’t be disproved, at least not in this century.
Most developed nations have below-replacement birthrates. Sometime in this century, the world’s population will begin declining. We could even reach the point where there aren’t enough people to maintain civilization in some places.
But the penguins and polar bears will be tickled pink, and that’s what really counts. Remember – People bad. Polar bears good. The left has gone from “Workers of the World Unite” to “Caribou of the World the Unite – You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Tundra.”
(To be Continued)
(If you missed Part I of the Liberal Lexicon, you can find it at http://www.grasstopsusa.com/df012109.html.)
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