Lingustic Spin

Some conservatives are coming to Palin's defense regarding her inability to use the English language.

This won’t hurt her with her base, of course — few things ever do, least of all the sort of vocab mistake to which millions of people can relate. All it’ll do is further prove her unpretentious populist authenticity.

"Populist authenticity"? Really?

Of course, this isn't the first time that Palin has used the made-up word, as Mediaite shows in a clip from Hannity on Fox"News"



And while Mediaite not only showcased Palin's premiere of the new term, they also reported that the tweet that garnered all the attention was deleted. Kind of puts a dent in the follow-up where she compared herself to Shakespeare. If she's going to "celebrate" her ability to molest the English language, one would think that she wouldn't be so ashamed of her word-salad dribblings.

I will concede that almost all pundits, politicians, and just about every average citizen makes mistakes like this. However, a woman like Palin - whom conservatives continually lionize as a woman of multiple talents who is allegedly smarter than Obama - makes these sort of mistakes ALL THE TIME.

Just take a look at her mangling of her native language in this clip.



Conservatives will defend anything this woman does or says, no matter how blatantly ignorant she acts. And these are the people that say that everyone in America should be able to speak English.

Nice Try Ed or Grammatical Projections

Conservatives are literally falling over themselves trying to find a way to declare that Scott Brown has already won the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. From attempting to parse the language of polling from Rasmussen to Ed Morrissey's latest attempt - blame a grammatical error on the candidate when she didn't even produce the ad.

Maybe Coakley ought to know how to spell her state’s name before asking voters there to send her to Washington to represent them. At the very least, it’s an answer to Democratic zingers about Dan Quayle, who managed to spell Indiana correctly even if misspelling potato on an infamous occasion.

Morrissey's drooling assertion is predicated on this bizarre notion that every political candidate produces their own advertising material. Even though this has the standard "approval" stamp at the end of the ad this does NOT mean that Martha Coakley produced the ad herself. That task falls to a media relations company that is contracted by the Democratic party for he state where the campaign is taking place.

To follow Ed's faulty logic, one would then have to assume that John McCain new how to use an AVID machine or video editing software in order to create all the ads from his presidential campaign.

However, if one were to claim that this entire piece was created at the hands of Martha Coakley, and he is really wanting to use grammar as a weapon, perhaps he shouldn't be pointing fingers at people that know how to catch their mistakes. Has he even seen the rampant bastardization of the English language on the multitude of tea-bagger signage the past year?

You Can Count On It

One of the more bizarre, and ultimately pointless, arguements the fringe-conservatives and Fox"News" has against Obama is that he uses certain words at a higher frequency than others. And these aren't words that seem odd, out of place, or have no bearing on the subject at hand. I'm talking about pronouns like "I" and their new word that they were talking about this morning - "unprecedented".



Talk about a waste of airtime. They might as well have been talking about the frequency of times that everyone on Fox"News" uses the word "interesting". Sure, they use it an "unprecedented" amounts of times during every 24-hour news cycle, but what does that prove? Nothing, that's what.

Let Me Count The Ways

You can easily tell when your opponent is struggling to maintain some degree of validity when they are reduced to sophomoric games like lambasting Obama for using the pronoun "I" rather than the editorial "we". It's this specific style of non-intellectual reasoning that the conservative movement loves to immerse themselves in.

The latest example of this is a piece by hogan over at RedState entitled Words Mean Things. His thesis is predicated on the fact that since certain words appear at a higher ratio than others, that this bill will likely mean that winged monkeys will descend from the hills and claw out your grandmother's eyes.

The word “shall” appears 3607 times, but “freedom” only twice. The word “penalty” and its various forms 163 times, but “liberty” doesn’t appear at all. The word “require” and its forms 1025 times, but the “Constitution” is absent both literally and figuratively. The word tax and its forms appears 183 times, fee 234 times, and “Internal Revenue” 104 times. Other words like apply, rule, culture, diverse, enforce, provide, authority - all words that appear repeatedly, while a word like “own” appears only 11 times. See the full list below. It is quite telling.

Other words that likely weren't in the bill:

Taint

Egalitarian

Goat-Fucker

Is the Senate version of healthcare reform any less important or more so because these words weren't included?

Media Matters decided that they would take a look at the Right's favorite document to see how many of these "objectionable words" they could find. The document - the US Constitution.

If the raw numbers themselves aren't shocking enough, consider this: by RedState's count, the words "Shall" or "Shall Not" appear 3607 times in the 2074 pages of the health care bill, meaning they appear 1.74 times per page. Those same words appear 337 times in the 20 pages of the Constitution, for an average of 16.85 appearances per page.

The evidence is clear: the Constitution of the United States is at least 10 times as socialist and tyrannical as the Senate health care bill. Thank you, RedState, for helping us to expose this founding document as the commie, Marxist, rag that it is.

But this is just another in a long line of misdirections from not only the twitchy folks at RedState, it is a continuation of years of obstructionist propaganda designed to distract, confuse, and disorient people when needed change is on the table.

And I have two words for Mr. hogan that perhaps he will find meaning in as it relates to his latest piece:

Rank Amateur

Some Thoughts For Your Day

- I love how language has become so malleable, especially in the last 10 years. With the advent of the internet, communication has taken on whole new forms and functions. Couple that with widely recognized forms of pop-culture language and words that you wouldn't expect have become verbs. Teabagger has recently become a finalist for Word Of The Year - and this has some people rather displeased. More on this later today

- I was on Twitter recently and saw a message from Meghan McCain. I find her particular brand of conservative Republican thought interesting and confusing at the same time. Her tweet that evening was in relation to the Newsweek cover that Palin herself is now calling sexist. And what made Meghan's statement just as peculiar is that she thought it was sexist as well. Here's what is so odd about both these statements - how can the cover be construed as even remotely sexist? There is no denying that Palin does pose quite the problem for the GOP, as has been discussed ad infinitum. Her rhetoric is both inflammatory and bizarre while not really serving to show that the modern conservative movement aren't the reactionary obstructionist that they have become since Jan 20th. But this is to be expected from conservatives. When they are backed into a corner and confronted for their actions and words, they claim they are victim to vicious attacks.

- And here's another reminder that healthcare reform is just not necessary and a waste of time for the American people. Nothing to see here, move along.

Some Thoughts For You Saturday Morning

- Is there any basis of fact that conservatives are operating on that proves that Obama's speech to school children next week is the first step towards mass indoctrination? Also, aren't children in school across America consistantly writing letters and essays and reports about how to help this country?

- Am I the only one that has noticed that conservatives seem to be confusing the word "progressive" and "regressive"?

- And speaking of the basics of the english language and the actual definitions of those words, why do not just conservatives but the entirity of the GOP seem to not understand what the word "context" means?

- If Sarah Palin is considered a "leader" of the conservative movement, what does that say about her as a role model to children of conservative parents? After all, this woman hasn't completed a job that she was tasked with since her failed stint as mayor of Wassila, Alaska. Conservatives all over this country completely ignored the fact that she essentially ran away from her duties as Governor.

- Conservatives have, over the past year or so, become increasingly more vocal about American history and how it is taught in schools. Why do they have such a problem with the entire American experience, both good and bad, being shown in text books?

- How long do you think it's going to take for some very prominent, very vocal, conservative to just completely loose it and call Obama a n***er? I hear this on a virtually weekly basis in my region of Kentucky. It's horrible.

- What exactly is the point of removing your kid from the entire day of education at school over a 20 minute speech from Obama encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school?

Lost In Transmutation

Recently I wondered what it would be like to diagram a Sarah Palin sentence. Well, while sifting through some of my favorite spots on the interwebds, I came across at piece at Political Carnival that wasn't quite what I wanted - it was so much more.

Here's some edited copy from Sarah Palin's intial exti-interview earlier this month.







I thought this part was especially noteworthy:

They had to insert the word "God". Yes, God apparently slipped her mind. Oh, and she got her presidents mixed up. I guess attending all those universities didn't pay off.

Ther veritable word-salad that is offered up daily, in super-sized portions, from Sarah Palin is always something to treasure. I can't wait for these "non-politically correct tweets" that she's been teasing about lately.

Someone Needs A Dictionary

Via Think Progress



Here's Pat Buchanan speaking at the "English Only" event.

Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton, she’s graduated with all these big honors and awards they said she never won. What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White? [laughter] [...]

Ah, the irony tastes so sweet.

Isn't it interesting that those that champion things like the English language, the constitution, or even basic science are always the ones that screw it all up?