Humans have been using euphemisms ever since Adam first "knew" Eve. In politics especially, obfuscating and twisting the meaning of words has been going on forever. But today's debates aren't only littered with rhetorical distortions; in some ways, many of Democrats' most potent arguments are built on corrupt language.
One word that's really getting a workout this cycle is "loophole." Basically, all of life is a giant loophole until Democrats come up with a way to regulate or tax it. In its economic usage, "loophole"—probably more of a dysphemism—creates the false impression that people are getting away with breaking the law. It's a way to skip the entire debate portion of the conversation and get right to the accusation.
So when Hillary Clinton promises to close the loophole of corporate inversion, what she means to say is that Democrats disapprove of this completely legal thing that corporations do to shield their money from the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. Loopholes are like giveaways, monies that D.C. has yet to double and triple tax.
It's one thing for Democrats to try and set the parameters of a debate before the debate is even had, but it's quite another to watch the press participate.
Here's CNN: "Clinton to push closing corporate tax loopholes." Here's The Hill: "Obama calls for Congress to close corporate tax loopholes." Here's how Halimah Abdullah and the Associated Press reported the issue on NBC: "President Obama on Tuesday criticized loopholes that help protect offshore tax havens and U.S. companies that move abroad for lower tax rates."
But Bernie Sanders, bless him, just skips the entire perception game and just comes out with it by tweeting: "The offshore tax haven network isn't something that we need to reform or refine. It's a form of legalized tax fraud that must end."
"Legalized tax fraud" is a revealing statement about the progressive belief system. For progressives, taxation is moral. So when you fail to pay an imaginary tax that doesn't exist but Democrats think should, you are by default engaged in fraud. The law has just to catch up with sin.
Take "access," formerly meaning having the ability to approach, enter or use. In today's liberal parlance, when the state doesn't give you something for free, it's taking something from you. It's denying you access.
When there's a lack of access to birth control, it doesn't, as the dictionary might lead you to believe, mean that Walgreens and CVS have been dissuaded from selling condoms, or that someone is bolting the door when women attempt to purchase birth control at the local pharmacy. It means that government has not made condoms free for anyone who desires them.
To oppose the latter—whatever you make of the position—is not tantamount to a ban or outlawing. Yet Clinton has accused Cruz of attempting to "ban" contraception. Neither Cruz nor any Republican in office today has ever tried to ban—prohibit, forbid, proscribe, disallow—contraception altogether. This is a fairy tale with a thriving political fan fiction community.
Voters who pay only marginal attention to political debates (most) are probably left with some vague notion that men are working to deny women access to birth control. It would be understandably disconcerting if this were true. The idea of a War Against Women loses a bit of its bark when it's really The War on Having Taxpayers Pay For Everyone's Pill.
"Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all," Clinton recently lamented as she spoke about the prevalence of the anti-abortion movement's activism. Women won't have a true right on this issue, she says, "As long as we have laws on the book like the Hyde Amendment (a provision pretending to bar federal funds for pay for most abortions) making it harder for low-income women to exercise their full rights."
By "extraordinary measures," Clinton means walking past anti-abortion protestors who might say something that makes a woman uncomfortable. Any genuine attempt to hinder a person from walking into a Planned Parenthood is already illegal, after all. Some of us, you see, are imbued with special rights, or full rights. Women who support the right to an abortion, for instance, have full rights—not women who want to express themselves in opposition.
There are plenty of other distortions. "Disenfranchisement" once meant revoking the rights gained through suffrage, but has been corroded to mean asking a person to provide a picture ID or to wait in a line before voting. Today, a country that deports hundreds of thousands of people every year has open borders, while millions of illegal immigrants are called everything but illegal. Today, tax cuts cost Americans something, but state spending is an investment. And so on.
This is just a small taste of the war on meaning, of course. And to allow them this falsification language is to surrender a debate before it even begins.
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