Phrase Warp

A gaffe, Michael Kinsley once famously said, is when someone accidentally tells the truth. Now, anyone who is anyone quotes Kinsley's statement "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."

In that spirit, consider a new term: "phrase warp." That, we'll argue, is intentional distortion of an expression- and it is one reason Mitt Romney, once he is nominated, will be difficult to defeat. In a column in USA Today, Romney argued that the upcoming election will pose a choice between what he terms an "Entitlement Society" and an "Opportunity Society" because

in an Entitlement Society, government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk. In an Opportunity Society, free people living under a limited government choose whether or not to pursue education, engage in hard work, and pursue the passion of their ideas and dreams. If they succeed, they merit the rewards they are able to enjoy.

In remarks prepared for delivery the next day in Bedford, New Hampshire, Romney expounded on this theme, contending

Once we thought "entitlement" meant that Americans were entitled to the privilege of trying to succeed in the greatest country in the world. Americans fought and died to earn and protect that entitlement. But today the new entitlement battle is over the size of the check you get from Washington....

In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing-the government.

An entitlement program, however, is "the kind of government program that provides individuals with personal financial benefits (or sometimes special government-provided goods or services) to which an indefinite (but usually rather large) number of potential beneficiaries have a legal right (enforceable in court, if necessary) whenever they meet eligibility conditions that are specified by the standing law that authorizes the program." Thomas Edsall notes


Romney and his aides have designed his rhetoric to define pretty much all spending on entitlements, including provisions for the injured, unemployed, sick, disabled or elderly as benefits to the poor who, Romney implies, are undeserving. And it doesn’t matter whether the money to pay for these programs comes from employer and employee contributions and not just tax revenue — they are all under suspicion.


There is no telling whether Romney's phrase warp will become commonly accepted in the media. But the implications for the 2012 elections are enormous, given parallel circumstances a decade ago.


One reason the Bush Administration claimed for launching Gulf War II in 2003 was possession by Sadaam Hussein of those rarely-defined "weapons of mass destruction." Obviously, no such weapons were found. But if chemical and/or biological weapons had been discovered, the Iraqi dictator still would not have developed weapons of mass destruction. "Weapons of mass destruction," we were led to believe (without any explanation) included biological and chemical weapons. In reality, however, biological weapons are clearly, and chemical weapons are likely, not weapons of mass destruction.. Wolfgang KH Panofsky wrote in 1998


Nuclear weapons can increase the total explosive power that can be delivered in military payloads by up to a factor of a million. The weapons detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed about a quarter of a million people, had an explosive power about one-tenth that carried by a modern nuclear weapon....

The destructive power of nuclear weapons is well understood. If a 1-megaton thermonuclear warhead exploded at optimum altitude over a large city, little would be left standing or alive within five miles. A firestorm could be ignited, further extending the range of destruction. In a large-scale exchange, lethal fallout would cover an entire region.... If virulent BW materials were to be widely distributed over an exposed population, then the ratio of potential lethality to the total weight of the material could be comparable to that of nuclear weapons. However, for this horrifying scenario to occur, the materials cannot be dispersed by a single-point explosion, but instead must be spread by an appropriate mechanism such as spray tanks or by "fractionating" a missile's payload and dispersing separate mini-munitions over a wide area. Moreover, survival of BW material depends critically on local meteorological and other conditions which define the delivery environment. The survival of agents is generally of short duration and effects are delayed for days. Fortunately, there is no operational experience and test data are limited....

There is little question that the lethality of chemical weapons-as measured by per unit weight of delivered munitions-is lower by many orders of magnitude than it is for nuclear weapons or the undemonstrated and inherently uncertain potential of biological weapons. Thus, it is misleading to include chemical weapons in the category of WMD; "weapons of indiscriminate destruction" or "weapons of terror" might be a more appropriate designation.

The Bush Administration could have acknowledged that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program but argued that most evidence indicated that it did possess biological or chemical weapons. But then the hawks could not have conflated biological/chemical weapons with nuclear weapons, and Condoleezza Rice could not scare Americans with visions of mushroom clouds.

And so the phrase warp, wherein non-WMD could be termed WMD, took over. Similarly, entitlements would as appropriately be termed "earned benefits." Still, even entitlements include only Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security rather than the entire social safety net that Romney infers. If his manipulation of the language succeeds, it will not be only President Obama's second term which will be endangered, but far more importantly, the vision of the late Hubert H. Humphrey:

the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

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Mere Coincidence


Good news- the FBI has made some progress in investigating the latest incident of right-wing violence, in Spokane, Washington, which we're not allowed to say is political. The News Tribune of Tacoma reported earlier today:

Federal investigators indicated Friday that they have made progress in their efforts to identify the person or persons who left a bomb Monday along the planned route of the Martin Luther King Jr. march.

“We’ve obtained quite a bit of clarity” as to the identity of those believed to be responsible, said Frank Har-rill, special agent in charge of the Spokane office of the FBI. “But we still have a lot of work ahead of us.”

We're to believe this and other incidents are isolated. Helpfully, Digby ticks off such random, isolated, and apolitical acts:

-- July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

-- October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.

-- December 2008: A pair of "Patriot" movement radicals -- the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted "to attack the political infrastructure" -- threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.

-- December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear "dirty bomb" in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

-- January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.

-- February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.

-- April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.

-- April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama's purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.

-- May 2009: A "sovereign citizen" named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

-- June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.

-- February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one "domestic terrorism" too.)

-- March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war.

-- March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead.

-- May 2010: A "sovereign citizen" from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse.

-- May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb.

-- May 2010: Two "sovereign citizens" named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed.

-- July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.

-- September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year--old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the "Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.

Each crime, domestic terrorism, or not, is different, carrying with it its own perpetrators, methods, and motivation. Still, questions need to be asked by a mainstream media too anxious to assume such incidents are completely unrelated to the political climate or to political ideology. Of Tucson, Michael Kinsley noted

Even more remarkably, in the past week, the question of whether a carefully planned assassination attempt on a member of the United States Congress might have had anything to do with politics has been mocked into oblivion. Well, let’s see. The dominant theme of Loughner’s ravings was suspicion of the government. He apparently didn’t believe in paper money and thought only gold has value. He believed the government was responsible for Sept. 11. And so on. This is not a random collection of nutty opinions. There is a theme to it, and it is not simply that the guy was crazy.

Meanwhile, our President, in his impressive speech at the memorial service in Tucson, warned the American people against "pointing fingers or assigning blame." No worry there- the mainstream media has practically ignored the bomb planted alongside the route of Spokane's Martin Luther King parade. Move along, folks- nothing to see here.

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We Have Met The Mark And He Is Us


In her famous video message produced in response to the shooting in Tucson, Sarah Palin famously claimed

But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Not only was she, nor anyone on the right, to be held accountable for vitriolic rhetoric, the actions of Jared Loughner were prompted by the left- those who "manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn."

The biggest supporter- inarguably (and figuratively)- of the ex-Governor, Rush Limbaugh, agreed, in his characteristically rambling style:

I mean we could just as easily say that the left is responsible for Tucson and events like Tucson because it is the left which routinely, regularly, continually agitates, abuses, punishes, fines, name calls. The left creates this environment in which the individual is smothered, treated as worthless and degraded. The left is constantly telling us how horrible we are, how horrible our country is. The left's leader runs around the world apologizing for this country, how unfair and unjust our economic system is; how our major corporations are out to kill you, to screw you, to rip you off. They create this environment of pessimism, of self-hate and loathing, desperation. They turn citizen against citizen, blacks against whites, men against women, Hispanics against whoever, you name it. People are constantly at war with each other. How can you been proud of yourself when you're told you don't sacrifice enough for your state, you're not paying enough taxes, you're not giving enough to the cause or that your ancestors committed some horrible offense. Or, if you're unable to succeed, it's because of the Founders and the inherent racism and unfairness of your culture and our Constitution, or capitalism.

The accomplished psychiatrist, Dr. Limbaugh, alleges that Loughner started shooting because "of pessimism, self-hate, and loathing, desperation" brought about by being told by liberals that corporations are evil. Or because our President has been "running around the world apologizing for this country" and "turning citizen against citizen," pausing, presumably, to say in Tucson

And I believe that, for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

Without referring specifically to Palin or Limbaugh, Michael Kinsley observes

In the week since the Tucson, Ariz., massacre, pleas for “civility” have turned into accusations of incivility, and the whole, useful discussion of “civility” versus “vitriol” has turned into the usual argument over competitive victimhood. The vast right-wing conspiracy has played President Barack Obama like a violin.

And they’ve done a pretty good job of messing with the heads of the liberal media as well. As a result, anyone who even raises the issue of who might be responsible, or more responsible, for the “atmosphere of vitriol” in which we conduct our politics is guilty of contributing to it. In just a few days, it has become the height of political incorrectness to suggest there might be any connection between the voices on right-wing talk radio and the voices in Jared Lee Loughner’s head.

Quoting Kinsley, Open Left's Paul Rosenberg concludes "Moral: Empathy is for suckers, and Obama is the biggest of them all."

But whether Barack Obama has been "played like a violin" or is the "biggest sucker of them all" is questionable. President Obama's favorability rating, admittedly already on the rise, soared after his speech at the memorial service. The American people, clearly, like the President- really, any President- in his role as Father-In-Chief. And when Obama absolves the purveyors of incendiary political rhetoric of any responsibility and calls for civility, conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, Pat Buchanan, and Monica Crowley applaud, lending a bipartisan veneer to the Obama presidency.

President Obama blames all equally- or, rather, no one. He asserted

....at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do, it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that -- that heals, not in a way that wounds.

But Kinsley notes

This sounds like a noble sentiment. But who is to blame for what ails the world if not those who think differently? If those who think the same as you are responsible, it’s time to start thinking differently yourself.

That, understandably, Obama will not do. But his comments comfort those whose words have been not only hostile, but vitriolic or even incendiary. And they allow the defenders of those individuals to suggest that it is the critics of violent rhetoric who are, in Limbaugh's words, "responsible for Tucson and events like Tucson."

Meanwhile, Obama stays above the fray, balanced but hardly fair or accurate. As the far right defends the further right, liberals and Obama's Democratic colleagues are increasingly marginalized. Barack Obama, then, is not the sucker, or played like a violin; the description better applies to his loyal supporters, who are being sacrificed to further his pursuit of a second term.

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McCain and the Alternative Minimum Tax

In Senator John McCain's speech on Thursday, 2/7/08, to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., he twice pledged to end the Alternative Minimum Tax.

The AMT was enacted as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, applies to corporations and individuals which because of "tax preference items" (deductions and the like) pay little or no income tax. Conservatives targeting the tax note that an increasing number of middle income taxpayers have become ensnared because it is not indexed to inflation.

But there is another reason more individuals have become subject to this tax. As the great columnist Michael Kinsley has noted, "George W. Bush's first-term tax cut lowered the regular income tax for affluent people so dramatically that many more people qualify for exactly what the AMT is supposed to do -- make sure that nobody with a high income gets away with paying little or no income tax."

Ending the Alternative Minimum Tax, therefore, is a supporting pillar of the Repub's "starve the beast" spending philosophy. You know how that works: inveigh against "big government;" cut government spending, thereby making government less effective; then complain about how ineffective and inefficient the government works. So, for taxation: complain about how much of a burden the (progressive) income tax is on the middle class; cut income taxes for the wealthy, as George W. Bush has done and John McCain wants to continue; watch as the AMT inevitably includes more of the middle class; then complain that the AMT is a plague upon the middle class and urge its abolition.

Cutting tax rates for millionaires and multi-millionaires is only one of the ways this "maverick" from Arizona will pander to the Repub base over the next nine months. Fasten your seat belts, for more is coming.