NOT LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD.

This CM Phillips thing I found at American Thinker resembles other modern conservative hissy-fits in which the Obamaization of America is blamed on something resembling linguistics. (You know the schtick: because liberalism is inherently awful, indeed anathematic, it can't possibly be its policies  that attract people to it, so its popularity must be due to some Jedi mind trick.)

But Phillips' essay is distinguished in two respects. First, while ordinarily these guys cite Saul Alinsky as the primal trickster with whose strategies liberals bamboozle the weak-minded, Phillips cites George Lakoff, who may be even less read than Alinsky, even by those conservatives who have pretty much memorized Alinsky in their struggle to prove he's the Mr. Big of contemporary liberal politics. (Maybe Phillips is just showing off for his friends.)

Most of  Phillips' numbered examples of how "liberals frame issues in narratives" which "undermines conservative’s positions" are  typical gibberish -- they call us "tea baggers," Phillips fumes, which is a "sexually offensive" slur on "decent Americans" who are the "moral opposite of the crude, law-breaking left’s Occupy Wall Street crowd," arrgh blaargh.

But then he gets to a few that I find instructive, because they're so obvious about something that usually gets soft-pedaled:

6) Trickle down -- The “trickle down” frame paints a picture of money trickling into the economy as the rich pay for their indulgences. This is just wrong. The rich are usually successful business owners... 

5) Capitalism -- Capitalism was Marx and Lenin's derogatory term for the free enterprise or entrepreneurial system. Even conservatives use this term too frequently... 

3) 1% -- The narrative is: “the top 1% have all the money, so there is little left for other 99%.” The top 1% pays more in taxes than the bottom 90%, but that is not enough for the Democrats. They attack the 1%, and if the greedy Democrats could, they would tax the heck out of the top 49%. The other 51% would keep them in office.

Notice that? Phillips got through all of these economic topics without once mentioning the global financial collapse of 2008, not to mention the slow-motion collapse of the American economy in the preceding years, from which we all continue to suffer.

If people are mentioning capitalism in something other than respectful terms, it's not because George Lakoff told them to, but because of what are regrettably still current events: While capitalism may have been possible to overlook when it was just quietly picking our pockets, it became impossible to overlook when it started breathing hard, thrashing, and foaming at the mouth. And the rich were not an issue until the ranks of the poor and verge-of-poor grew to include nearly all of us, and many more  than previously began to recognize that the 1% were not just lovable drunks from Dudley Moore movies, but an interest group whose interest ran directly and sometime violently counter to their own.

Yet Phillips can't even acknowledge that. To guys like him, nothing really exists except the epochal struggle of good conservatives and evil liberals -- not in Iraq, not in New Orleans, and certainly not in the market. It's like what they think about charges of racism -- that's just some kind of word you liberals are using; it doesn't have to do with anything real.

I remember when it was the liberals who were supposed to be the head-in-the-clouds, disconnected-from-reality types. They were assumed to have spent too much time looking at books but not enough time seeing life as it is -- you know, like Meathead on All in the Family. But as the ranks of wingnut welfare recipients have swollen to feed vast online opinion factories, they seem to have taken over meathead production. Another market triumph!