A Bullet for the Meme War Arsenal

[akirlu]

Waking up to NPR, as you do, I heard an analyst use a golden phrase to describe half of the Congressional inactivity on fixing Social Security. Free Lunch Republicans. Gosh that's beautiful. It's got such wide applicability. Everytime they trot out the old chestnut about "Tax & Spend" Democrats, you can reply that only Free Lunch Republicans would imagine that you can keep spending money without having some first. It's particularly exquisite because there is that brand of "Libertarian" Republican who is only too fond of reciting TANSTAAFL at the drop of a rhetorical hat.

Please feel free to disseminate widely.

Comments

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

Brad DeLong said something very similar the other day on his blog, as an aside in a post about something else. He said, "that's the key difference between Democrats and Republicans these days--Democrats don't believe that the resources to fund government actions are created out of thin air by wishing *really* *hard*)".

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeedy, I read that post too, though I admit I wasn't thinking of it at the time. But I think that's part of why the phrase 'free-lunch Republican' is worth disseminating: I think the idea that the Republicans have gone totally looney tunes in the fiscal responsibility department is becoming ambient, and to the degree that Phil Agre and others are right that this is a propaganda war, the more powerful our arsenal of it, the better.