Sunday, August 06, 2006

2735 Pot calling the kettle black

Geoffrey Nunberg is on C-SPAN discussing his theme that our social and political language is pulling to the right, having written Talking Right. He runs political speeches through speech analyzers, and is concerned that the Republicans can produce a coherent, but bland, standard speech from an archive, but Democrats' speech is gibberish (my word), implying I suppose that there is variety, but no message. But I noticed he uses the word "right" exclusively for conservatives, but the word "liberal" or "Democrat" and never "left," i.e., "At that moment, the right began to brand liberals as. . ." He also refers to Democratic politicians by their full name, i.e., Geraldine Ferraro, Spiro Agnew, and Republicans by surname only, Reagan, Limbaugh, with a little spittle. I don't think he reads the NYT, WaPo, or listens to CNN.

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