GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
07/20/2011
The left thrives on language-manipulation, what George Orwell called “Newspeak” in his novel “1984.” It’s not a tax hike; it’s revenue enhancement. It’s not racial spoils; it’s affirmative action. Instead of class warfare or punishing productivity; call it making the rich pay their fair share. It’s not anti-Americanism, it’s historical revisionism.
Lib-speak is poison dipped in chocolate – toxins lethal to the economy, the culture and individual liberty. The idea is to hustle the unwary, to make them think they’re buying charity, equity, sweetness and light, when in reality the left is selling variants of a creed that’s failed miserably for more than a century – whether it’s called socialism, multiculturalism or moral relativism.
This year, with a debate raging over everything from a $14.3 trillion national debt and unemployment over 9%, to the meaning of marriage and the nature of terrorism, it’s more important than ever to cut through the fog of liberal clichés, exposing the snares they conceal.
This is the third installment of an ongoing series. Links to “Lib-Speak” and “Lib-Speak II” are found at the end of this commentary.
• Refusing to Raise The Debt Ceiling – According to President Recession-What-Recession? and his binge-spending party, raising the debt ceiling (authorizing more deficit spending) should take no more thought than deciding whether to order a venti latte or iced cappuccino at Starbucks. When Obama took office, the national debt was $10.626 trillion. Today, it’s over $14.3 trillion. In other words, in two years and 6 months, Obama increased the national debt by 35%. (Just imagine what he could do with a second term.) We’re now spending money we don’t have at the rate of $125 billion a month. According to bankers, bondholders and Democratic politicians, Republican refusal to mindlessly go along with another authorization to dig the deficit hole deeper, without exacting meaningful spending cuts, is based on obstinacy and a malicious need to embarrass this president. (Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee even suggested it was racially motivated.) Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hints at an inability to send out Social Security checks, even though a few months ago he assured us the system was self-funding. According to the left, there’s no downside to raising the debt limit – there’s no crowding out effect on private borrowing, interest on the debt won’t consume a growing portion of federal spending, the debt won’t be monetized and we’ll never run out of lenders. (The Chinese are chumps with bottomless pockets.) In other words, at Obama’s Club Fed, the party never stops.
• Tax Loopholes – In the debt-ceiling/budget-balancing debate, Barack Obama (who has the same effect on economics that Genghis Khan had on demographics) inveighs against tax “loopholes” – described as demonic devices allowing greedy corporations to avoid paying a reasonable share of their income. At the outset, understand that corporations already fork over to the feds a hefty portion of their earnings. Oil and natural gas companies pay an effective tax rate of 41% - money that could go into exploration and development (lowering energy costs) and increasing employment all around. A loophole is any deduction that the left doesn’t like. Just a few months ago, the president was ragging on the tax break for corporate jets, until someone reminded him the deduction was written into the tax code and extended by Democratic Congresses, to bolster an airline industry reeling from the effects of 9/11. The biggest loophole (though it’s rarely described as such) is the mortgage-interest deduction According to the CBO, this mother of all tax breaks will result in a loss of $131 billion in tax revenue in 2012. Of course, ending it would send an already wobbly housing market into a tail-spin. Like beauty, tax loopholes are in the eyes of the beholder. The left’s anti-loophole ploy is part of its overall strategy in the deficit debate – keep the focus on increasing revenue rather than reducing spending.
• Public Employees (AKA Government Workers) – Just about the swellest people on earth according to the libtocracy. (And to think, some have suggested that the anthem of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees should be “Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.”) According to liberal mythology, these hard-working, dedicated, heroic public servants are the backbone of the nation. Reagan allegedly wanted to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Today, Republican governors are said to be using the prostrate bodies of public employees as a dike to contain a raging sea of red ink. Threaten to take away a penny from government workers (in the form of pay or pension contributions) and the apocalypse is at hand - notwithstanding that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2006, the average state or municipal worker received $78,853 in salary and fringe benefits - $25,771 more than the average serf toiling in the private sector. Only 18% of private-sector workers get a pension, compared to 80% of public-sector drones. But look at what we’re getting for our money. Massachusetts 8th-graders, who have the best math scores in the nation, still rank considerably below Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Students in New Mexico, Mississippi and DC have math scores comparable to those centers of scholarship - Bulgaria, Macedonia and Moldova. To protect its fiefdom, the National Education Association gives 96% of its PAC contributions to Democrat candidates.
• Tea Partiers – From the left’s perspective, evil personified – howling mobs that hate minorities and the poor and want to demolish the fabulous federal colossus built since the days of FDR. Comedienne-cum-commentator Janeane Garofalo called them “a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks.” “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up,” Garofalo raves. (Presumably, if a white man was intent on ruining the economy and nationalizing health care, tea partiers would be cheering hysterically while throwing confetti in the air.) An April 2010 CBS News/New York Times poll showed 37% of tea partiers are college graduates (compared to 25% of the general public), and 56% earn more than $50,000 a year. So, here we have a mob of middle-income, educated red necks. When Tea Party activists were asked their goals, the top four choices were reducing the role of the federal government (45%), creating jobs (9%), lowering taxes (6%) and cutting government spending (6%). These are indeed depraved and desperate characters. Hide the children and farm animals when they’re in town.
• Civility – That which liberals preach the most and practice the least. From the left’s perspective, civility means “If we stub our toes while kicking you in the teeth, we’re the victims.” Civility is a truncheon the left uses to bash conservatives for exercising their First Amendment rights, while it gleefully smears its opponents. When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six others killed in January (the man charged with the crimes is clearly delusional – even more than Janeane Garofalo), liberals claimed the deed was inspired by right-wing rhetoric. Clarence Dupnik (the left’s favorite lawman), Sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, where the crimes took place, blamed talk radio, the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin (whose PAC used a graphic of target over Giffords’ congressional district) and Arizona’s “racist” immigration law. (It’s easy to mistake a Democratic Congresswoman for an illegal alien.) But when Massachusetts Congressman Mike Capuano urged union goons demonstrating in support of Wisconsin public employees to “get out in the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” the establishment media and liberal civility-mongers barely raised an eyebrow. Such is the hypocrisy surrounding calls for civility.
• Teaching Tolerance – AKA: brainwashing – pushing the left’s agenda in the guise of fighting hatred. The most recent and egregious example of this is California’s SB 48, just signed into law by the state’s geriatric hippy governor, Jerry Brown. The statute requires California textbooks, for all grades, to positively promote “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans” as “role” models.” (I don’t think California’s Barnum and Bailey legislature had Jeffrey Dahmer in mind when it passed this.) Among the contributions of LGBT Americans which will not be noted – indeed, which textbooks will strenuously avoid discussing – are astronomical rates of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases among the unnatural-acts community. What liberals call teaching tolerance the communists called “raising class consciousness.” In its POW camps, the North Koreans called them “self-criticism sessions.” Liberals call their form of re-education, which takes place in public-school gulags, teaching tolerance.
• Religion of Peace – Muslims are another victim group which we must be taught to affirm – by avoiding reality at all costs. If Islam is the religion of peace, then Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (where the faith is practiced most rigorously) should be among the most harmonious places on earth – instead of sinkholes of repression, misogyny, jihad and rabid anti-Semitism. Consider this: Any list of influential Christians would likely include Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. For Islam, the same list probably would include the Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind cleric who masterminded the first WTC bombing). It’s the difference between faith, hope and charity and fatwas, suicide bombers and honor killings. The website www.thereligionofpeace.com - whose motto is “Islam: the Religion of Peace (and a big stack of bodies)” - has a list of Islamic terror attacks for the past two months alone, not the past year, not since the beginning of the year, but just in the last 60 days. Between May 15 and July 14, there were 322 terrorist incidents, in 23 countries on three continents, resulting in 1,580 deaths. If Islam is the religion of peace, German is the language of diplomacy, Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen are models of sobriety and President Obama is a study in humility.
• Conspiracy Theories – According to the left, exclusively the province of the right. The media even have a name for those who believe Dear Leader was born in Kenya – “birthers.” (I’ve always thought of Obama as more an alien of the extraterrestrial kind than an undocumented politician.) Why Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee actually believed in a communist conspiracy (that our government was riddled with Soviet agents) – except, wait a minute, our government was riddled with Soviet agents, a fact verified when Moscow opened its intelligence files after the fall of the USSR. Unlike conservatives, liberals are far too sophisticated to go for crackpot conspiracy theories, except for a few little things like: 1. The October Surprise – the theory that in 1980, the Iranians held our embassy hostages until after the election, to secure the defeat of Jimmy Carter, because they preferred a big wuss like Ronald Reagan in the White House instead of a manly man like the president who fled from a killer rabbit. 2. The Stolen Election – the notion that the Florida Secretary of State, the manufacturers of paper ballots and the United States Supreme Court (that notorious bastion of conservatism) stole the 2000 election from Al Gore. 3. 9/11 Was An Inside Job – the paranoid delusion that the Bush administration engineered the attack on the World Trade Center to give the president a pretext to attack Iraq, to give the Iraqis a chance to grab our natural resources (the tax dollars we’ve poured into that sandpit). Van Jones, Obama’s former Green Jobs Czar, signed a “9/11 Truther” petition. Comedienne-cum structural engineer Rosie O’Donnell said it was impossible for fire to melt the steel frame of the Twin Towers (She should be writing for “Scientific American” and “Popular Mechanics” or “Popular Paranoids”), and 4. The Big Oil Price-Fixing Plot – that oil producers are sitting on a secret petroleum reserve that they won’t release to keep gas prices artificially high. Clever the way Gulf, Shell and Exxon engineered the ban on off-shore drilling. Except, I forget, the left’s conspiracy theories are actually reasonable assumptions based on scientifically verifiable evidence – in the objective opinion of its lapdog media.
(To be continued)
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now
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