Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Weekly Standard Admits to Conservatives' Privatization Newspeak
MyDD catches Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard 'fessing up to the cons' using Newspeak WRT Social Security. Here's some of what Barnes had to say:
To sell Social Security reform, the president has already adopted strategies associated with Republican consultant Frank Luntz and Presentation Testing's Richard Thau. They've derived lessons from dozens of focus groups and polls on this issue.(...) Where Bush is following the advice of Luntz and Thau is in avoiding certain poisonous words. Chief among these is "privatization." Supporters of reform toss that word around to describe the process of creating investment accounts controlled by individual workers. To the public, however, it indicates corporate control of Social Security, which they oppose. Bush never utters the word. Instead of calling investment accounts funded by payroll taxes "private," he calls them "personal."Of course, as Josh Marshall documents here and here, the lapdog corporate media dutifully changes the terminology they use when Uncle Karl orders them to do so. The latest change -- to use the words "personal accounts" instead of "private accounts" -- just happened within the last few weeks; before that, Bush and all the other privatizers were using the words "private accounts", words that they themselves came up with. Why are the Republicans so frantically trying to play this Orwellian shell game with the language? Because they are getting their asses kicked on the Social Security privatization issue. Their only defense is to keep bullying their GOP/media axis lackeys into changing the terms they use every couple of weeks. But just as calling an outhouse a commode doesn't make it stink any less, playing the Newspeak game won't make Americans fall in love with the idea of seeing Bush and his Cato and Heritage buddies throw their money down a rathole -- and put the US trillions of dollars in debt in order to do it.
Some of the editorial cartoonists are calling them on this, too:
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