"Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts."  Madame De Stael

“HOW THE MEDIA USE LOADED LANGUAGE TO MISLEAD & MANIPULATE”

This is part of an ongoing series on how the left uses loaded language to distort reality and shape our thinking. It’s also an effort to describe the unspoken assumptions which underlie these clichés.

Democratic Socialism – Based on the principle that theft is okay if a majority votes to steal your money. Socialism is theft on a grand scale. Democracy is a way of ordering government; socialism is a way of redistributing (stealing) income/property.

Despite the protestations of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their allies that socialism isn’t a totalitarian system like communism, one has a way of morphing into the other. Venezuela has had socialism for 20 years, first under Chavez, now under Maduro. Besides destroying what once was the jewel of Latin America, as dissent mounts, it becomes increasingly clear that the country’s socialist party will never voluntarily relinquish power, regardless of the outcome of elections. Socialists are power-junkies. Once they have a steady supply, asking them to go cold turkey (through the orderly transfer of power) isn’t wishful thinking. It’s delusional.

Abolish the Electoral College – So Hillary Clinton won a majority of the popular vote nationwide in 2016. So, what? We’ve been electing presidents through the Electoral College (as provided by the Unites States Constitution) since our inception.

People like Elizabeth Warren say the Electoral College is undemocratic. It is – and rightly so. The Founding Fathers wanted the small states to have some power left after the United States was formed. Today, a candidate must amass a majority of electoral votes won state by state. The winner of the popular vote in each state gets all of its electoral votes; the loser gets squat. This forces candidates to campaign in states like Connecticut and North Dakota that might otherwise see presidential candidates only on television. It also means power is diffused, instead of being concentrated in big states (largely blue) and large cities, which the left dominates.

Instead of as “Maine goes, so goes the nation,” it would be: As New York, Illinois and California go (or, more precisely, as New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles go), so goes the nation. The federal system would be over and absolute democracy would prevail, at least in terms of choosing a president.

Yes, the Electoral College is un-democratic, so are the Senate – where Texas (pop. 28.7 million) has the same number of Senators as New Hampshire (pop. 1.36 million) – and the Supreme Court (where justices are nominated by the president, instead of chosen directly by the electorate). That’s the way our wise founders wanted it. The alternative is rule by entrenched Democrat bastions, often dominated by racial-identity voters.

Expand the Supreme Court – When the Warren Court and the almost as radical Burger Court held sway, no one on the left talked about increasing the number of justices to 15 or 20. Likewise, when SCOTUS made abortion on demand the law of the land and mandated same-sex marriage against the express wishes of voters in a majority of states, liberals weren’t fuming about the courts “dismantling democracy. ”

It’s only since conservative presidents began appointing constitutionalists to the bench that the left decided, in the words of the group Pack the Courts (at least the name is honest) that “democracy simply cannot function when stolen courts operate as political shills.” The Democratic party thinks that it, and it alone, should control the courts, regardless of who is elected president. They view SCOTUS as their judicial house of lords, imposing their ideology on the cringing heads of the American people. A system that once worked great for them, they now find abhorrent. Thus, they want to ensure that whoever’s elected president, their control of the courts will continue in perpetuity.

Indigenous People’s Day – This racial celebration is an attack on America’s European heritage and advances the myth that we started not as a noble experiment but a nightmare. A number of cities and states have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day.

It’s based on fantasy-history that the left has been pushing for decades – That the Italian explorer brought slavery, disease and genocide to the Western Hemisphere, that his voyages marked the beginning of the destruction of paradise.

But long before Columbus, the happy, frolicking natives of the New World practiced slavery, human sacrifice, the mutilation of captives and ritual cannibalism.

Despite Columbus’ faults, he was the spearhead of a process of colonialization and settlement that eventually resulted in a civilization that provided material well-being for the masses, scientific progress and the advancement of human rights.

Those who would trade Columbus Day for Indigenous People’s Day are saying that the world would have been a better place without European colonization and the creation of the United States. The idea that American Indians who, for the most part, had a bare subsistence existence and hadn’t gotten around to inventing the wheel when Europeans arrived, would have somehow stumbled on capitalism and representative government is worthy of those who live at the level of clichés.

Two-State Solution – It’s a utopian notion that never dies, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary: That Israel can lie down with the jackals of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority – as if the so-called Palestinians could live in harmony with anyone, let alone a people they hate body and soul, and delight in butchering. Palestinians don’t even talk about a peace process. They speak of intifada, jihad and annihilating the “Zionist entity.” That Fatah is considered the moderate here speaks volumes.

The Palestinians would be willing to accept whatever territory Israel ceded to them, to be used as a base to destroy the rest of Israel.

Without Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), Israel loses its early warning system (Jewish communities in what are called the territories). More importantly, it lacks the strategic depth to stop an invading army. (Under Jordanian occupation of the West Bank, Israel was about 8 miles wide at its narrow waist.) The Two-State Solution will very quickly become a One-State Solution, to state a fact.

Medicare for All – Whatever Democrats propose here, it’s always a variation of socialized medicine. Over the past 43 years, we’ve gotten used to Medicare, so why not expand it? Bring in everyone.

That’s the fairy tale version. In reality, if you like VA hospitals (shortages, long waits, inferior care, and lack of accountability), you’ll love Medicare for all.

Compensation for medical professionals will take a nose-dive. We have some of the best-paid physicians in the world, as well as some of the most skilled. (Americans don’t go to Canada to get treatment.) This will make the current shortage of medical professionals acute.

Private health insurance will be outlawed. (They forgot to tell you that, didn’t they?) As medicine becomes more bureaucratized, it will take longer and longer to approve new drugs, devices and procedures. Wait till euthanasia and medical triage become standard. Politicians will be the only winners. It’s not about improving health care. It’s about power – ultimately, power over your life and health. Physicians may heal themselves. Politicians never get better. 

Green New Deal – Proposed by 28-year old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose last job was serving booze in a Manhattan saloon), who assures us that “millions will die” if we don’t adopt this form of economic hari-kari. (Al Gore on hyperdrive.)

The Green New Deal would be so disastrous for the U.S. economy and ruinous to taxpayers and consumers, that not a single Democratic Senator supported it in a recent vote (most voted present), not even the most far-out lefties. The cost over the next decade has been estimated at between $50 trillion and $93 trillion. Even the latter may be low.

In brief, it would: 1. End the use of fossil fuels (low-polluting natural gas as well as oil), 2. Require the “refitting” (demolition and reconstruction) of every building in America, 3. Provide free college tuition (the place where new socialists are minted) 4. Guarantee a job to everyone who wants one at an always undefined “living wage.” 5. Mandate “safe, affordable, adequate housing for every American” 6. And end air travel, which AOC believes can be replaced with high-speed rail. (She’s not great at geography, as she’s admitted, but does she know that Hawaii isn’t connected to the mainland?)

Instead of three words, the Green New Deal can be described with two – Venezuela-envy. The GND is going nowhere at high-speed. But various components will keep popping up in Democratic climate-change proposals from here to apocalypse.

© Don Feder