Avoiding the Truth by Bastardizing the Language
JUNE 22, 2012 4:00 A.M.
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
by Ian Tuttle [Edited, emended and truncated with added emphasis by FT]
Here’s a little secret,” Keith Olbermann told viewers in 2010. “When racist white guys get together and they don’t want to be caught using any of the popular epithets ... in use every day ... about black people ... [instead they] resort to euphemisms and code words.”
Olbermann [did acknowledge then] that not all white people are racists, but three and a half years into “the first post-racial presidency,” one might [not] get that impression.
Take the list Olbermann enumerated on air: “Cocky, flippant, punk, and especially, arrogant.” Last week, Congressional Black Caucus executive director Angela Rye added cool to the list: “Even cool, the term cool, could ... be deemed racial.”
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| Keith Olbermann censoring the truth |
Liberals have spent the past four years tearing out page after page of Merriam-Webster. “Articulate” and “bright” [deemed condescending] were forbidden early in the 2008 primary season, ... [However, [numerous] media outlets had bestowed the same compliment on John Edwards ... years before. [In] 2004 Slate called Edwards “bright and articulate and really, really youthful” ... Steve Benen [of] The Carpetbagger Report wrote in 2003, “Edwards is ... bright, articulate, and aggressive ...”
In April, Mitt Romney unveiled a new campaign slogan at a stop in Ohio:
“Obama Isn’t Working.”
“Racist!,” cried Mediaite ... It evokes “the stereotype of the ‘lazy,’ ‘shiftless’ black man.” [Communist activist] Van Jones, Obama’s erstwhile “green-jobs czar,” said ... the slogan set off “racial fire alarms.”
[T]he Romney campaign explained, the slogan was a tribute to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party, whose 1978 “Labour Isn’t Working” poster ... was named “The Poster of the Century” by Campaign magazine: ...
[Any] criticism of Obama policy is also [deemed] racist. During [the] health-care overhaul debate, NPR claimed “a sharp divide between liberal and conservative whites on racial issues.”
[R]esponding to ... Congressman Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during the president’s 2009 health-care address ... New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, “But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”
... Michael Moore [claimed] “Obama succeeded [with] young voters “because they’re not as racist as the [older] generations,” implying, of course, that all those older white folks who rejected Obama ... were racists.
[I]f liberals can find racism in Obama’s ... victories, they can certainly locate it in his defeats. When a federal prisoner in West Virginia received more than 40 percent of the vote against Obama in May’s primary, state Democrats blamed “racist voters.” However, a closed Democratic primary admits no Republican voters, so the Democrats effectively condemned their own.
The Left hears so many “dog whistles” in today’s public discourse that one fears to say anything at all.
And that’s the point. Liberals use the accusation of racism as a cudgel to cow political opponents. [The tactic] forestalls or derails substantive debate. ...
Liberals have spent the last four years manipulating and excising words because they refuse to confront reality.
But then, we already knew that, [didn’t we?]
You may find Mr. Tuttle’s complete article, as originally written, at:
What to say without typing in profanities?
ReplyDeleteProgressivism is a form of profanity as well as insanity.
ReplyDeleteOooh! I feel a limerick coming on ...
Let's see ...
Progressives, possessed of great vanity,
Cause expressions of ardent profanity.
Their love of the uncouth
And denial of Truth
Are examples of rampant insanity.
I'll see if I can find a way to improve that as the day wears on.
Cheerio!
~ FT
Well Freethinker you are still left with explaining the massive blind hatred by the right of a man who is at best centrist but probably center/right.
ReplyDeleteLeft with the dictum to describe just what is progressive about his platform you just stand there scratching yourself after you yammer about the individual mandate.
No, there has to be an explanation for the hordes of brain damaged right wing birthers and idiots who call him a Muslim.
@ Quacker: Well Freethinker you are still left with explaining the massive blind hatred by the right of a man who is at best centrist but probably center/right.
ReplyDeleteNo he's not. You and your whining wathist behind evwy twee betwetting leftists are, so stuff it where the sun don't shine.
Orwell said it best: Speech codes are thought codes.
I recommend this short essay of his to everyone:
Politics and the English Language
Wow, that was a real knockout punch, Silver.
ReplyDeleteThere certainly has been a cheapening of rational dialogue in the nation but I will ask again how you explain the brain addled birthers, morons who call him a Muslim and fringe right Randoids who call him a Communist.
Again, I ask why he is considered a radical and wonder if you cn come up with anything but the mandate.
"A conservative candidate who should present himself to his electors by declaring to them that he did not regard them as capable of playing an active part in influencing the destinies of the country, and should tell them that for this reason they ought to be deprived of the suffrage, would be a man of incomparable sincerity, but politically insane."
ReplyDelete--- Robert Michels
Why his work, Political Parties is ignored today is beyond me. Cuts to some of the serious problems we can't find our way through.
Is it racist not to vote?
ReplyDeleteInteresting point about compulsory voting in the article you linked, AOW. Surely it's worth featuring as at least one blog post all by itself?
ReplyDeleteAs a believer in freedom, I, personally, don't favor making anything compulsory -- ever.
Logic ought to tell us that those who don't want to vote or are too lazy to bother should automatically disqualify themselves from participating in the process, and, therefore, deserve whatever they get from those who do.
There are more weeds than flowers among the potential electorate. Why do anything that might encourage these undesirable elements to further choke out the few beautiful blossoms that might still be left in our once wisely and beautifully tended national garden?
~ FT
We will allow your blathering irrelevancies to remain, Canardo, as striking examples of how leftists use pointedly assertive strawman arguments to address concerns not relevant to the subject at hand.
ReplyDeleteYour antics remind me of a rhyme I learned in Freshman Speech seven-hundred years ago:
Amidst the mists and freezing frosts
With loudest boasts and sternest jests'
He thrusts his fists against the posts,
And still insists he see the ghosts.
Someday, you may be brought face to face with the realization that your quaxotic life on the internet has been nothing but an exercise in futility. When that day arrives, I will probably feel compassion for you.
Keep sounding your sour notes, Canardo.
Their dissonance only makes the harmonies we produce sound that much sweeter.
Meanwhile, I'm sure many others will join with me in earnest prayer for your ultimate Salvation.
~ FreeThinke
Ducky: How do you explain the brain-addled people who voted for an inexperienced, incompetent nobody whose only accomplishment was writing two paeans to himself?
ReplyDeleteSilverfiddle, I brought up a reasonable idea for discussion.
ReplyDeleteMichels, Pareto, Mosca ... the Italian school of elite theory predicted this situation where we would be in this stasis.
Rather than this nonsense of Mittens/Obummer why aren't we dealing with the question of political inertia.
You don't strike me as someone who hasn't figured out that Mittens is not the answer to that problem
"Elite theories" are the very things that got us into this frightful mess, Ducky.
ReplyDeleteWe are where we are because of Man's attempt to play God in the guise of Social Engineering and Collectivist economic policies.
The topic here, however, was meant to be confined the way leftists use suppression of information, distortion of the intent of language, and willful, determined obfuscation of Truth to gain political advantage.
~ FreeThinke