Language Tricks

Liberals have an insidious way with language ... to try to box us (of the opposite view) in ... a form of newspeak ... often relying on sardonic criticism ... bordering on unhinged irony. Here are a few samples of their inside-out and upside-down thinking:

 The American flag is "just a piece of cloth"

A human embryo is but a "blob of protoplasm"

Voter fraud suppression is "voter suppression"

Ted Kennedy was a "Lion of the Senate"

Illegal imagrantion is "an act of love" ...

Climate change is the unopposable way of saying "global warming"

Hillary Clinton was the "most qualified candidate"

The Teaparty is "unacceptably radicalized"

Illegal immigrants under the age of 36 are "children" and "dreamers"

Groupthink

Liberal Bill Maher finally addressed the students at that liberal bastion, UCal Berkeley, on Saturday and told students to avoid “groupthink” (that famous and insightful term from George Orwell’s book, “1984”) … be an individual, a free thinker. He ironically also cajoled them to be soldiers in the fight against climate change. “I hope all of you here today consider the environment to be paramount among the many challenges we face.” See: Breitbart Article.

Need I point out the obvious to you dear reader? The religion of climate change is one of the most blatant examples today of "groupthink." Bill Maher might just as well have been speaking “newspeak,” warning of “thoughtcrimes” to the “Ministry of Truth” members at “Airstrip One” (other insightful terms from “1984”). Maher, much as he likes to view himself, clearly is no hammer thrower.

Job Lock

Can Democrats get any nuttier … or more insidious?  As a way of diminishing the impact of the damaging report of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the consequences of Obamacare for future American unemployment (2.5 million full-time-equivalent job losses by 2024 … see: NY Post Story), the Democrats and their pals in the main-street media have once again hidden behind semantics.  They have tried turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse with the term “job lock” – the requirement that people need to work in order to get health insurance.

In other words, CBO has it right, but instead of these virtual job losses being bad ... they are good because it reduces job lock … see: Huffington Post Article.  Big Brother has saved these 2.5 million full-time-equivalent people from the horrors of working.  This is another perfect example of the Obama administration’s Orwellian newspeak (see "More Newspeak" Blog Entry).

I still remember another poignant example of this kind of liberal semantic mind-bending.  Once on a visit to the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, some left-wing wing-nut classified (on a poster) all the farm girls … who had escaped the drudgery of rural life for this exciting new work opportunity … as “wage slaves.”  So, in other words, the industrial revolution became, with the twist of a phrase, the equivalent of forced labor on Southern plantations … really now!?

Red Flags

Yesterday, I blogged about how the Obama administration was trying to control the language describing Muslim jihadism (see: Wouldn't It Be Nice).  Now our President, in a graduation speech at Annapolis, has tried to remove the term “war on terror” from our political vernacular (see: Reuters Article).  I am quite certain that many news outlets will now dutifully fall in line with his suggestion.

Once again we see despotic leaders trying to control the body politic by dictating the language that is deemed acceptable to them.  President Obama’s Naval Academy speech is yet another attempt at thought control … and is straight out of George Orwell.  This should be another gigantic red flag to us all.  Orwell warned us when he said:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

and

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

For more and better expressed thoughts on this same subject see: The American Thinker Piece.  

George Orwell was right on the money in his novel “1984,” but his timing was off by about 30 years