Getting the Words Right

Getting the Words Right: Towards Saying What is Actually Meant

Ever since the Republican resurgence led by Ronald Reagan, words in political discourse have come to mean completely different things from their dictionary definition. Sound bites and slogans are quoted as if they were cogent arguments backed by actual facts. Republican operatives have hijacked the very language of political discourse. They seem to think the rest of us will neither notice nor care because by the time the deceit underlying their words is revealed the world will have moved on to the next news cycle.

Republicans sneer at “cut and run Democrats,” wimpy folks who will not stand up to our country’s enemies. But “cut and run’ really means that the Democrats are guilty of not lending unquestioning support to the flawed policies and knee jerk patriotism of the President. Similarly, “tax and spend” Democrat is a charge meant to conceal the fact that Republicans are doing just the opposite: cutting taxes for the rich while bleeding the middle class and shipping their jobs overseas. We should be talking about “cutting taxes for the rich while bleeding the rest” Republicans. They never saw a tax break for the wealthy or a corporate give a way that they did not love. These reverse Robin Hoods take from the many and give to the few. Does anyone believe that most voters favor corporate welfare and tax breaks for the idle rich who live on inherited wealth and have never worked a day in their lives? “Tax and spend,” indeed. How dare they?

It goes on. They direct attention to so-called “welfare queens” who are ripping off the public, while diverting the public eye from “corporate welfare Republicans”. The former fiscally conservative party has been totally co-opted by fat cats and good old boys who constitute the “haves and the have mores” of the country as President Bush jokingly but accurately described them.

The party of “getting government off our backs’ is actually working hard to abandon or gut public safety nets such as workers compensation, unemployment benefits, minimum wages, social security, health insurance, and the like in favor of a virtual smorgasbord of corporate welfare programs disguised as “tax incentives,” “protection of essential industries” and “leveling the playing the playing field” between workers and employers! They have allowed friends to grow richer than kings by exploiting the country’s natural, human, and social resources and then legally move jobs and profits overseas so they can escape their fair share of the country’s legitimate expenses.

“Support our troops” is a sound bite designed to shout down critiques of the policies and practices that got us into an endless war for none of the stated reasons. These adamant defenders and supporters of our troops meanwhile have defeated and/or opposed proposals for providing benefits and adequate pay to veterans and their families while awarding no-bid contracts to cronies. There are actual breadlines of military families who are unable to live on what our great military supporters provide for God’s sake!

But perhaps the greatest language pervasion of all is the Republican Party’s claim to be the party of “family values.” What kind of family is it pray tell that: specializes in inside dealing, corporate greed, and the triumph of special interests while claiming the right to wage pre-emptive war? Exactly which family values encourage economic policies that favor the rich over the poor, or that declares war on civil rights, or openly favors one religion over others, while failing to protest the most helpless and less fortunate citizens of our country and allowing corporations to legally steal the retirement benefits of their workers? Family values? It is enough to make the average person sick to his stomach.

Hal Crowther has exquisitely detailed the hypocrisy of the current pretenders to the conservative tradition:

"The GOP has allowed itself to be taken over by oil loving, tax evading, bedroom regulating, privacy hating, working class discriminating, religious posturing, chest thumping, corporate bond-clipping, privileged access peddling, off shore profiteering, party of the haves and have mores. How did such as these ever manage to take over the home of the brave and the land of the free?"

How indeed.

Under the guise of patriotism and supporting the troops, this administration has attempted to secure support for the wrong war in the wrong place that was started for the wrong reasons. Our precious national wealth has been squandered on give a ways to companies already drowning in record profits while enriching a bunch of desert oil sheiks.

The former party of equality and individual freedom is now given over to intolerance of almost everyone else. Judging by their actions over the past eight years, they hate blacks, women, bedroom privacy, poor folks, religious tolerance, reasonable gun-control, individual freedoms, gays, liberals, real free speech, corporate accountability, and so on and on. They even appear to hate fiscal responsibility since they have deliberately and decisively transformed the largest surplus in US history into its largest deficit in less than 3 years. No small accomplishment by itself.

These derogatory, misleading catch phrases and sound bites have been repeated endlessly in the media for decades now. They have become so embedded in the American political psyche that they often frame a debate before it even begins. Many Democrats have become so worried about being labeled a “tax and spend liberal” or a “cut and run Democrat” or as being against “family values” that they pull their punches or otherwise fail to directly confront the real nonsense behind such labels. Democrats and liberals need to generate some different sound bites and start embedding those in the minds of voters. We can do it and do it successfully, because we have a better message. I really believe that.