Over at Bloomberg's "Obama Asks Republican Lawmakers to Discuss Health Care Overhaul" a new phrase flitted out of Mitch (R-Corporatism) McConnell's mouth and somehow stuck in my brain.
The new phrase?
"heath-spending" bill
Not Health Care, but Health-Spending. Note the hyphen.
Mitch (R-Corporatism) McConnell:
"If we are to reach a bipartisan consensus, the White House can start by shelving the current health-spending bill,” McConnell said in an e-mailed statement. “There are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf."
Not being quite sure that I'd heard that exact wording before, I did a quick google for "health-spending" bill -- note the placement of the quotation marks, which were a deliberate part of the specific search I made.
google returned Results 1 - 50 of about 164,000 for "health-spending" bill. (0.44 seconds) but it is interesting to note that only the very first hit has exactly the quoted phrase: all others combine "health" and "spending" as two separate words, but with no hyphen to link them together into a single concept.
Yesterday I posted a comment to "Frequency" by Dante Atkins in which I posited the idea that the right has been systematically re-working American political speech to support their worldview for decades:
The right wing in this country began to seriously re-work their messaging in the late '60's as near as I can figure (It's a research project I'd like to get into, but haven't yet).
They took the concepts enumerated in Orwell's "1984" and ran with them: particularly NewSpeak, and the idea that by vigorously and consistently reworking language you can ultimately control not only how people think about stuff, but what they can even think about.
This most recent may be nothing at all, or it may be Yet Another New Buzzword(tm) in the right's continuing recasting of American political speech.
- bp