Repoublespeak

"Good job, Brownie."
and
"Mission accomplished."

Nancy, good ones.

Brandon, sexual deviancy is in the eye of the beholder, I would imagine. I think "gay" is a label chosen by and for those who self-identify with that label.

If you think minorities have equal opportunity in this country without affirmative action, I suggest you go walk around some neighborhoods in East Baltimore or maybe the 9th ward of New Orleans sometime.

Very few people are pro-abortion. The majority of people in this country are, however, pro-choice.

I remember that, gatobilis. Michael Moore included the clip in his Fahrenheit 911 movie. Bush's base.

No google hits on "repoublespeak", so it seems like you really are its creator... On the other hand, why doesn't google find this gather article? Perhaps it's too new? Does anyone know?

In any case, congratulations! To make it look linguistically cool, you might want to add the pronunciation. I think it would be [rI"pVbl=%spi:k] with SAMPA, and /rih-PUB-uhl-speek/ with the respelling method, but I could be wrong...

Aniko, thanks for those pronunciantion tips. I think you're right about the 2nd one, though I'm not familiar with SAMPA. I would have done a pronunciation tip, but last time I tried that, I did it in MSWord and then pasted it into Gather and Gather couldn't handle the special characters that were in it.

About Google, I have never seen Google come up with anything from Gather. There are so many articles here, you'd think something would come up from one of my searches one time or another. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps Gather tries to keep spiders out because they would slow down the site too much?

Perhaps. But google does find your gather stuff through your username, for example. :-)

SAMPA is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet, but it substitutes the special characters with computer-readable ASCII characters. (That means though that there's a different system for each language, rather than using the same character for the same sound in all languages that have that sound. But it's better than a garbled mess...)

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. You're right about google, too. I just had never searched for my user name before.

Oh I like this. I really like this.

The best example of Orwellian double speak in American politics today is "Political Correctness," conceived and promoted by the "progressive" types.

Ooooh, beg to differ on that one. Someone help out here? I _think_ Political Correctness (as in "one is either correct or not correct") was a conservative attempt to describe progressive attempts at sensitivity and inclusive speech. When someone gay would say, "hey, I am going to call myself gay and I don't identify with "sexual deviant" then someone who just wanted to keep on talking however they liked without regard to how it sounded to others would complain that once again they were being required to toe the line of "political correctness."

Similar to "There you go again," generally in response to a line of reasoning or a stated set of facts, which are then termed "ridicuous lies," or some variation thereof, but perhaps this is not technically redoublespeak. I'll have to try harder.
.
Another one is "progressive types" or "left leaning" altho come to think of it that does not fall, technically, into the category of repoublespeak in the sense that Astrogirl defined it. Denigration [for example use of the word "ilk"] may be just that, denigration, as opposed to saying one thing as an excuse for or to cover up something else.

I like the way "terrorist" has morphed into "secular extremists" though for the life of me I'm not entirely sure exactly what he means when he says that. I've always gotten the feeling that he is leaving wiggle room for applying it to just about anybody who is "secularist." Because they are "over there" right now but they could "come here" at any moment. I don't think the latter part though technically falls into the category of true repoublespeak either--very tricky redoublespeak, as well as orwellian.

"Secularist" [or a liberal] could be one who preys on and persecutes christians, especially evangelical christians; and the "exteme" aspect kicks in when you get to evangelical zionist christians, or sunni's, I guess.

Gee this is fun but I have to go beddy bye now.

Told you it was bedtime. No wonder I can't do it; I didn't even spell it right. It's "repoublespeak -- not redoublespeak. Although the latter has a certain ring, of truthiness to it. REPOUBLESPEAK. REPOUBLESPEAK. There.

How about - "cut and run";"stay the course":"no child left behind" - more children got left behind since this repoublespeak came out,'work Americans won't do",'axis of evil'

"Evil Empire" means "Empire R Us," but maybe no on will notice if we put it on the other guys.

"moving forward to success" means its a miserable, disastrous, catastrophic failure, "but I'm gonna do it anyway because I [we] don't care how bad it is as long as we get to hole up and hunker down in that brand new embassy--after all, it cost a fortune and by gummy we're going to us it."

"Secular extremists" means people who think our founding fathers had some dang good ideas when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

"Liberals" means moderates, or anyone not on the extreme right.

"The Patriot Act" is the most unpatriotic piece of legislation ever invented and should be called "The Getting A Start on Totalitarianism Act."

"There's just no evidence of that wacky leftist idea," means you're really onto something.

"He/she has no business experience" means a candidate who isn't in cahoots with big corporations and is going to serve the people instead of providing more corporate welfare and taking graft from big business.

"Socialized medicine" means people might finally get the health care they need.

"Democratic primary candidates who can't beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton" mean anyone more likely than Hillary Clinton to beat the Republican candidate in the general election.

"You should support the president in a time of war" means "we are really out of ideas, so we're going to try to shut you up by making an abject plea for illogical loyalty."

Astrogirl: "Secular extremists" and the "patriot act"are particularly apt. I have written many letters on the latter; and informed Feinstein she did not have my vote because of all the closed door negotiations in which she participated. It was her or Green. She normally gets a big chunk [42+%] of the republican vote; many moderates actually voted Green because of this and the botched war.

"The Dems never have a plan" means: Until the recent election they didn't have a chance of a snowball in hell of passing any real legislation; BUT NOW THEY DO!

"I'm not going to let them run us out of there," means I know I'm licked, but if I drag my feet the dems will get the blame for it--right about election time.

"The Iraqi's need our support" really means: the Iraqi's want us to get the hell out of there--but Halliburton isn't finished cleaning their clock because we so thoroughly smashed it to smithereens in the first place--smashed it up really good-- so costs a lot and takes a lot of time.

"The stakes are too high" means we haven't done any of the above--but there's still stuff we need, like some oil contracts and ongoing strategic position, and the democracy isn't quite spread yet.

"Supporting the troops" means they can jolly well do without up-armored humvees and the most basic equipment [they're still short on the uparmor kits, amongst other things] and keep your dissenting, unpatriotic mouths shut because we're moving onto star wars and "transformation" for the long haul.

"We've got to train more Iraqi's [using 'advisers'] so we can stand down," means the Iraqi's ARE telling us we should get our hands to heck off the bicycle seat because they want to do their own training [with equipment and money we give them]--with a maybe a few embeds because if all hell breaks loose, Oh well.

"We're not going to abandon them," means we already have [just like we did before] and furthermore we've cut deals with the various factions using your tax money--to the tune of $2 bln/week, but let's not talk about that.


It's gonna be a long haul, a long war" means "WE LOST QUITE AWHILE AGO" but there are plenty of deals to be made with lots of multinational corporate special interests and lots of votes to be gathered in military defense and production [cluster bombs for Israel among other things] in U.S., plus that gives us time and rationale to work on beefing up the troops and star wars.

"In the interest of national security" means its in our very specific special interests and you, dumb electorate, don't need to know.

"Transparency" means we've gone to great lengths to conceal what we're doing because we know you probably wouldn't approve of it.

"If we cut-n-run from Iraq, the terrorists and extremists win" translates to "we really shot ourselves in the foot here, because there were no terrorists or extremists in Iraq, until we deposed the only truly secular leader in the arab world in Saddam Hussein - and now the whole place is practically crawling with extremist groups, and there's absolutely no hope of the people of Iraq ever democratically electing a government thats not an Islamic theocracy that will inevitably at some point denounce the U.S. as "the great satan", so now we're screwed no matter WHAT we do."

"I'm not gonna let them run 'us' out" means "I've already cut some deals and when I [we] finally bail out--or ease our way on down the road, we'll just blame it on the democrats, Bill Clinton--or whoever and whatever is handy at the time--take your pick."

"A new way forward in Iraq" means "we have to find some new slogans to diguise the fact that we fully intend to 'stay the course'."

"I'm listening to advice from the Generals on the ground" means "Now that the whole country knows I've been ignoring the advice from the Generals on the ground since day one, I have to find some way to convince everyone that the Generals support whatever it is I do from now on."

"The stakes are high" doesn't actually refer to the war in Iraq, but rather the price of Halliburton stock.

"We will stay until the job is done" means "now that the Iraqi's have agreed to hand over control of their oil infrastructure to private entities, we will stay until it is up and running."

Steve, so true and so maddening -- hope there's 'some' kind of reckoning after the first of the year when Waxman starts sharpening his pencils, speaking of Halliburton and others.

You have missed a bunch of them. Death tax instead of estate tax (that one has millions in tar paper shacks supportint it's repeal, even though the estate has to be three mil or more to be effected), tax relief instead of tax cuts (relief implies being put upon), entitlement program instead of social progams (a sense that someone is just taking something they don't deserve). These and what you are talking about were well thought out conservative think tank strategies called Framing. They have been using them since shortly after Dole lost, because they studied why they couldn't win, and found out it was because people voted their best interests, and to get them to vote for you you need to lie.

Thats exactly right, Ron. They do it with the help of their media propaganda machine, too. If you'll notice, they've started replacing the word "Democrat" with the term "liberal" wherever possible - now that they've managed to convince alot of people that "liberal" is an insult.

I'm already getting sick of hearing conservative talking heads call Barack Obama "Barack 'Hussein' Obama" -- and then say "why not? it's his name, isn't it?" as if it were common practice to add a Senators middle name when referring to them. I remember hearing some GOP strategist woman on CNN call him "Barack Osama" -- and then pretend that it was a innocent slip of the tongue. Anything to try to cut down a man who they are afraid would probably win if the people were informed and voted only on the important issues.

Steve, you've gotten the trained ear down good. We need to get everyone else to hear what they are really saying, not what they said. They are systematically trying to tear down Obama, as you have said, and yes, i have noticed it. Another thing they do is lie with figures, such as their tort reform, that portrays frivolous lawsuits as major costs to the health industry, but actually they generally aren't frivolous, and they add less than 1%. It's all lies, and just another slicker way of doing it.

They systematically try to tear down anyone they think might be able to beat them in the general election. At the same time, they try to make it sound like they're really threatened by our weakest candidate, try to make that person sound strong. The minute the Democrats have a nominee, all the guns will come out after the nominee. You watch. It happened to Kerry in 2004. Before he won the nomination, he was portrayed by the Repubs and the media parrots as a tough guy, a war hero, a hard candidate to beat. The minute he had the nomination, all the points they could attack him on were brought out.

You guys have found some great instances of Repoublespeak. By the way, feel free to email my article to your friends, if you feel it's appropriate. I would like to get this term into the common vernacular. People need to know this is what the Republicans do.

It is not only dangerous to buy into their language it is reprehensible. My favorite one is the "death tax." There is not such thing but it sounds ominous so they use it. We all pay for this lack of honesty. Inheritance taxes are against those who have not earned it - not the dead person. But, they will continue to use this double talk because they believe that they are entitled to something they have not earned.