I well recall being stunned, and tongue-tied, the first time I heard a wingnut use “class warfare” in this novel, Newspeak way. And this was the precise intent – to stymie me by destroying and inverting the common language.

Anything that would identify working people as a group with a collective set of interests that are different from and at times antagonistic to the interests of corporations has pretty much been erased from public discourse. People will refer to “blue collar workers”, “working families”, “the poor”, the “working poor”. But the working class simply does not exist.

Exactly. If you lack the words to express a concept, it exists only in your own mind, or perhaps in the minds of others, each isolated and disempowered from one another. I suspect this is part of the problem for John Edwards, whose campaign stresses working class poverty and who must feel at times like he’s shouting into the wind.

It is crucial to begin reclaiming our language from the systematically destruction it has suffered by the right. Having succinct definitions of altered phrases like “class warfare” or “liberal”, at the ready, to immediately rebut a wingnut’s usage of the same is critical. Even before this, we must create awareness of how and why the right has been deliberately destroying langugage – Niewert’s article is a good place to start.

Releated to this is the right’s attempt to edit history by modifying wikipedia entries, but that’s on another level altogether. The Ministry of Truth, hard at work.

How to get started?

Indeed our right, if you believe the Constitution, ‘to pursue happiness’, according to today’s Republicans, is our right as long as it doesn’t interfere with or deter the plutocrat from his pursuit.

And of course the big lie is the free-market, laissez-faire touting capitalist who deplores ‘government’ interference in his business except when his business needs bailing out, outrageous tax breaks, government subsidies, union squashing laws, whatever. What they’re really advocating is socialism for themselves and capitalism for the poor.

I read that ‘happy rightie blogger’ piece, got to the last statement which you quoted and can only say it was a marvelous example of a non-sequiter.

Consider the contrast between these two sentiments.

First, from Ronald Reagan, the essence of the modern right-wing in American politics: “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.”

Second, from the Founding Fathers: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Quite simply, the modern Republican Party is systematically undermining and destroying the best system of government ever invented by human beings. While waving a flag (and carrying a Bible), they are doing what the Nazis could not do, the Communists could not do, and terrorists in their wildest dreams could not do. A cross between a gang of thieves and a colony of termites, the Republicans in the last 25 years have done much to turn this great nation into a hollow, helpless shell of its former self.

Consider these Republicans: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. They used government to save the United States, end slavery and guarantee equal rights, open up the West, bust trusts (monopolies), regulate foods and drugs, establish national parks, go into space (NASA), build interstate highways, and integrate previously all-white public schools.

Now consider these: Rutherford B. Hayes, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. They abandoned black Americans, cut taxes for the wealthy, entrusted regulatory agencies to the interests they were supposed to regulate, provided aid to businesses rather than unemployed workers, turned government agencies and programs over to cronies and/or profiteers, attempted to privatize Social Security, and so on. Republicans in this stream used to believe in balanced budgets, but Reagan and Bush gave that up in favor of ever more tax breaks for capital. They used to believe in small, non-intrusive government, but Bush blew that away with the Patriot Act and Terri Schiavo.

Today’s Republicans have become the opposite of Lincoln, have ignored what TR actually did (especially in domestic matters), and have forgotten Ike. Bush and Cheney are like a distillation of everything bad in Republican history, but with a new and dangerous authoritarian twist (“unitary executive”).

And I left out the administrations of Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon, those Republicans associated with sexual, financial, partisan, and espionage abuses. Needless to say, Bush and Cheney’s Republican Party …

By the way, Maha, I had previously used this quote from Theodore Roosevelt, which I will close with here: “The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants… Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”