Full of Meaningless Words -- and lots of them.
Doublespeak is the art of purposely misleading with confusing use of language, using as many words as possible, something right-wing politicians have perfected. The term appeared in the book 1984 and was the method whereby the government so confused its population and used language to create a new reality that it was able to take control of that population. “War is peace” was a concept sold in 1984 and tellingly, used many times by the Republicans in the last 8 years. Doublespeak is defined as: “Language intended to distort or obscure its actual meaning. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms, unsupported generalizations, or deliberate ambiguity.“ (About.com)
Republicans, right-wingers, climate change deniers, and many if not all politicians have used doublespeak at one time or another, but Sarah Palin, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the right-wing school of How to Mislead have gotten PhDs in Doublespeak. Phrases like, “I’m not a quitter, I’m a fighter!” (Sarah Palin, after quitting her job) and “They hate us for our freedoms.” (George Bush, when telling us why terrorists attacked us) are just a couple of examples of hundreds of thousands of examples of Doublespeak we have heard over the last several years.
Political doublespeak is dangerous, because it’s killing the meaning of language. If words no longer mean anything, why bother expecting speeches or communications of any kind to mean anything or to make sense, and if words don’t make sense, why bother listening? The end result is that the public will become even more uninformed than they already are, and dumber as a result. This was the mission of FOX News from the start. and politicians like Palin and Michele Bachmann are carrying on this mission of using nonsensical, meaningless communications in order to control how people think. It’s like advertising or public relations, only for people half-asleep, or hypnotised. Republican politicians are simply destroying public language with their doublespeak.
At last some conservative wordsmiths such as Peggy Noonan, herself a former speechwriter for Reagan, have had enough. She’s fighting back with her latest, and from reading it, I think it’s clear she was never a fan of Palin’s to begin with.
A Farewell to Harms
Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.
Sarah Palin’s resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. . . . .
. . . . She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician [not so much, and only when someone else was writing her lines for her] who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.
In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m.
In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.
McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.
. . . .
What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.
“She’s not Ivy League, that’s why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don’t have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism.” This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it’s included in U.S. News & World Report’s top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named “Abe,” and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!
America doesn’t need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.
“The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon. [what a great line!]
“She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.
“She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes.” She shows your cynicism.
“Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues.” Mrs. Palin’s supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think “not thoughtful” is a working-class trope!
“The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.
“Turning to others means the media won!” No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn’t the media want to keep that going?
Here’s why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.
. . . .
It’s not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won’t be that way.
We are going to need the best.”
You can read the whole thing here.
Ms. Noonan wants the best, but she’s in the wrong party for that. The lowest common denominators of the Republican party (Joe the Plumber, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, etc.) are the biggest heroes, and those the “BASE” (i.e., the Ass of the GOP) likes the most. The dumber, less informated, less coherent the politician, the more the Republican BASE likes them.
I think we should stop demanding we want our country back and just ask for our language back.
www.350.org"
