Posted on 10/25/2016 7:26:33 AM PDT by Auntie Mame
Whenever you want to go around town calling Democrats “liberals,” you should remember . . . Democrat Kathleen Kane who was convicted of using her public office to terrorize and persecute her political enemies. Only an idiot would still call Democrats “liberals” after seeing what they do in office.
Words matter.
One of the things I see Republicans do all the time that helps Democrats a lot is when a writer on the Right uses the word “liberal” to describe any Democrat. To me, that is like cutting a check for $100 and sending it to the DNC for every time you say or write that word.
Focus groups prove over and over again that “liberal” is a word that the general public enjoys hearing and they have a good connotation that comes with it: they think it means open-minded, generous, kind, and caring. They associate it with sentences such as, “I would like a liberal helping of sprinkles on my ice cream sundae” and “While on vacation, I am looking forward to applying suntan lotion liberally to wherever Channing Tatum will let me touch him.”
. . .
The people who foolish Republicans keep calling “liberals” are actually fiendish monsters who seem more at home in the Soviet Union than what is supposed to be America.
Democrats today are firmly totalitarians who use mechanisms of the state to punish their enemies whenever Democrats are elected to positions of power.
These are ruthless people who have no qualms about weaponizing the IRS to shut down conservative groups or pressure the FBI to destroy its own credibility by hamstringing an investigation into wrongdoing by a high-ranking Democrat official such as Hillary Clinton. There is nothing “liberal” about any of this…and you are an idiot if you don’t see how calling these people “liberals” helps them.
What you are doing is helping to obscure all of the truly scary and vile things that Democrats are up to now that they never used to do back when they really were tree-hugging former hippies who were just misguided. These new Democrats are hardcores leftists.
Take disgraced former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane for example. Would you stupidly call her a “liberal”? She is a classic example of the sort of totalitarian leftists that Democrats have become.
* She used her elected office as a weapon to persecute and torment her enemies.
* When caught, she lied about the horrific things she was doing to abuse her power.
* She believed she was untouchable and unstoppable and presided over a reign of terror in the Attorney General’s office, thinking that she could do as she please in autocratic fashion.
* Even when convicted, she felt so privileged that she truly believed she should receive no jail time because she is that special of a snowflake.
If you are someone who still, in the year 2016, goes around calling Democrats “liberals” I really wish you would stop and think about people like Kathleen Kane. THIS is who Democrats are now. Whatever you remember them being 30 years ago doesn’t matter, because THIS is who they are now and THIS is who is causing all of the horrible problems we have today.
And you are helping them!
When you call Democrats by a name that accurately reflects who they are — leftists, totalitarians, lefties, cultural marxists, etc. — you make them sound LESS appealing to people who either don’t follow the news much or who do whatever the tee-vee says for them to do. But when you call Democrats “lefties,” you make Democrats sound UNAPPEALING.
There is no positive connotation to the word “Left.” Everything thinks “left” is a negative: being left behind; something coming out of left field; a person being left-handed (and, thus, alien in that way because most people are right-handed).
Words matter…but Republicans never want to admit that. Democrats, on the other hand, realize how much words matter and they focus group test everything. If something isn’t working for them, they drop it. And they never say that thing again.
Take for instance Hillary Clinton awkwardly saying “Trumped-up trickle-down economics.” You can tell that she really loved that phrase; there’s a good chance she thought of that herself. She tried using that at a debate and then in some stump speeches but she was lampooned for it. Even Saturday Night Live, which rarely does anything to ding her, mocked her for this phrase. And she has not said it in public again since. Her campaign pretends it doesn’t exist now.
Why? Because it wasn’t working and since people could use it to make fun of her, it was hurting her more than it could help her. So she deleted the phrase from her programming. And all Democrats followed suit in lockstep. This is why Democrats win elections and why Republicans lose so often.
Democrats understand that words, branding, and messaging matter. Republicans instead say, “I’ve always called them liberals and I’m gonna keep calling them liberals because you can’t tell me what to do!”
How well has that worked so far?
"Rip a page out of the Democrat play book. Tag every descriptor with extreme. Extreme leftist Extreme lefty Extreme Marxist Extreme socialist It works."
What do you think about this?
Fascist is more accurate.
So what the Democrats use the IRS to go after its supposed enemies,The FBI protects the Democrats like Hillary and goes after to average to poor citizens. Think about it folks. In my opinion the Democrat Party is Evil and uses government to go after folks that disagree with them. Nothing different that Venezuela ,Cuba and Hitler did. America’s ignorance is now destroying her.
I never use the term “liberal” unless it’s in quotes. I use progressives if I’m trying to be nice, and commies most of the time.
Jefferson, Adams and Washington were “liberals”...champions of liberty.
The current leftist party is best described as “Socio-communists”.
Fascist?
Meh...the first step toward communism.
Democrats are anti-democracy, and they are the opposite of true liberals. How someone can call themselves a liberal and be a democrat today is a mystery
“America’s ignorance is now destroying her.”
That’s one of the better encapsulations of everything I’ve heard of late.
What do you think about this?
This will subject me to flaming, but I think the fact that she’s a woman cannot be ignored. The old line about a woman scorned has a grain of truth to it. I have seen too many women try to settle scores in the workplace in unseemly ways. They’d go places a man would never go.
Aside from that, this is pretty much standard operating procedure for Democrats in Pennsylvania. Where she screwed-up was in turning her wrath on other Democrats. She could have gotten away with this for years if she had confined herself to shafting Republicans.
Despite all that is outlined here, I would not be shocked if she got elected to some office again after she gets out of prison (again, SOP for Pennsylvania Democrats)
This is why I just call them communists.
I only use socialist if someone points it out, but only to elaborate why I think it’s as bad as communism and, in some ways, worse.
How about “Extreme Fascists”?
Communists hijacked the word “Liberal” years ago.
I never use the term “liberal,” either in my writing or casual conversation. My preferred words are “leftist” or “statist.”
I’ll spare you the long explanation but most “conservatives” today are what historically would be called “liberals.” Economist Murray Rothbard wrote a superb essay on this point, which I think would be easy to find on the Mises Institute site.
Today, you see the term “classical liberal” used from time to time.
Think John Locke, Montesqieu, Adam Smith. In our time, think of the Austrian school economists like Mises, Rothbard, and Friedrich von Hayek.
Well aware that what I am is actually “liberal”. Been here fer a while now.
chickensoup has been saying this ever since she first came to FR 17 years ago!
Words matter and how they are used matters.
Always use leftist.
Always paint them for what they are.
Democrat leftists are morally libertine but politically fascist and totalitarian in their views as to how the state should be run!
I think people confuse liberal with libertine!
They really are neo-feudalists.
Something is needed to make them embarrassed to show who they are publicly.
I disagree. Most people with any kind of political awareness learned long ago the "liberals" are among the most illiberal people conceivable. "Liberals" themselves realized this years ago and have strived assiduously to supplant the term with the word "progressive." They are no more progressive (except toward a dictatorship) than they are liberal. I prefer to call them liberals precisely because of their aversion to the term.
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