It almost always comes down to words, because words are windows into worldviews. Here's Andrew McCarthy's summary of the current goings-on:
“Every vote counts” is yet another semantic battle the Left has won before the right even realized it was on. And winning the semantic battle usually means winning the policy battle.
Of course, it is not suppression to oppose the counting of votes that should not count because they are not lawful. Yet Democrats succeed in putting Republicans on the defensive because Republicans do not want to be smeared as vote suppressors . . . especially when, inevitably, Democrats and the media will intimate that any effort to enforce election law as written is suppression driven by racial animus."
McCarthy's right about that.
Thinking along similar lines, Daniel Greenfield is also worth reading, and for him the key word in this election was "racist," because Democrats tried hard to paint Republicans with that threadbare brush despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. (As one Internet wag put it, every blot on the American national character -- slavery, segregation, and abortion -- either is now or once was a part of the Democrat party platform).
Perhaps the only thing that Greenfield's analysis misses is the impact of "panic porn," which is what we got for eight months because of the way the media mishandled reporting on Wuhan Coronavirus cases with scant attention to recovery rates, context, or risk management.
Another example of a semantic struggle surfaced in Newsweek magazine, which described courageous Catholic priests as "hostile" to a Biden presidency.
One wonders what John Leo would say (although Maureen Mullarkey's tribute to him gives strong hints).
No comments:
Post a Comment