Political lies have always come bundled in the Economy-pack: half-truths, misquotes, bald lies, propaganda, slung mud, smear campaigns, slips of the tongue, Freudian moments, avalanches of excrement, and surprised misstatements -- where the politico is stunned, simply shocked, they will tell you, at what their mouths have just gone and done.
It is as if their mouths were no longer under their control, or had been repo'd, dragged or lugged off back to the shop for some diagnostic tests.
Add one more to that litany in the big Econo-pack: Political cross-dressing, where a politician hijacks a word or phrase from the opposition, kidnaps it, then bandies it about, willy-nilly, hoping to squeeze some attention from the thing.
This is usually done in obvious, gaudy, and quite glaring ways -- like The Willard and The Newt really reaching to pluck "vulture capitalist" and "fat cats" from the thin air, they hold them way off at arm's length, as if these animals were not related in any way to them.
The trick is to hold up these animals for the crowd in a just-like-so way as to create the required head-turning attention, without them turning on you, without getting yourself razored by claws or pecked at by sharp beaks, and not raked over by shredding talons.
Over the years, Regressives have been stealing and co-opting language from Progressives in such a way as to garner attention, using popular concepts -- like empowerment, or gender equality or sustainability and so on -- then turning these concepts right on their heads. With enough linguistic grease, the GOP hopes and prays, no one will notice the language has been hit by a bus and two trucks.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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