Tactical Imprecision

On long car trips I catch up on my Right Wing talk radio listening. Wednesday beginning an11-hour drive from West Kentucky to Northern Virginia I caught Mark Belling (billed as Milwaukee's best known radio personality) sitting in at EIB mike spewing the sort of bilious invective one expects from El Rushbo’s associates.

In the course of his performance of the Neocon Rant 12a (crediting Reagan’s policies for the current strength of the US economy), Belling referred to the Carter era economy suffering “triple digit unemployment, triple digit inflation, triple digit interest rate, triple digit everything.”

Really? Was I asleep when the country had a100% unemployment? 100% inflation? 100% being the lowest possible triple digit option.

It is possible to attribute bullshit like this to the cavalier disregard for fact and common sense that is the stock-and-trade of Right Wing talk show hosts. But two days on NPR’s Diane Rehm show I heard Mark Twain biographer Ron Powers refer to Twain as an “opponent of anti-imperialism.” What he meant to say, of course, was that Twain, a fervent opponent of imperialism, was a founder of the Anti-imperialist League.

While Powers’s case is one of misspeaking unlike Belling’s utter disregard for the truth, both illustrate the increasing inability of American public figures to speak the English language. Our president is the poster child for this affliction, but it’s not exclusive to the Right.

The Right, however, has pioneered the use of imprecise speech as a political tool realizing its tactical benefit, the obscuring of the lie. As Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston informed his student, the last Chinese emperor PuYi: “Your Majesty—if you can not say what you mean, you will never mean what you say.”