Frank Luntz, author of Words that Work Its not what you say. Its what people hear, an experienced propagandist for the Republican Party Leadership, has written the talking points for the Republican’s attack on healthcare reform.

Luntz calls it The 10 Rules for Stopping the Washington Takeover of Healthcare.

Luntz’s specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate. [Wikipedia]

For instance, instead of calling it “oil drilling” Luntz calls it “energy exploration.” Sounds better–avoids the stigma attached to oil companies. The process of changing words in this way is called “framing.” He reframes “global warming” into “climate change” because it sounds more like nature is changing the climate on its own instead of by human beings. This oblique manner ascribes blame for the melting ice caps to nature rather than man. The idea is to shift responsibility away from polluting industries which emit CO2 into the atmosphere. [Read more →]

The Republican right-wing apparently thinks the United States, somehow, is God’s favorite nation of the world. They don’t cite any direct quote from God to that effect. I thought the Israelites were God’s chosen people. Nonetheless Gingrich, Huckabee and North apparently have a direct pipeline to the Creator, perhaps are on a first name basis with Him. That closeness with God, they seem to feel, entitles them to tell us all when and over what we are failing to live as God wants us to live.

Last Friday, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Oliver North visited Rock Church in Hampton Roads, Virginia to give a three-hour long lecture on “Rediscovering God in America.”

They warned the audience about the “continuing availability of abortion, the spread of gay rights, and attempts to remove religion from American public life and school history books.”

The Virginia-Pilot reported that Gingrich argued that, while Christianity is the foundation of American citizenship, Americans are experiencing a period where they are being “surrounded by paganism”:

GINGRICH: I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator. [...] I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history. We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.

Huckabee also equated America’s victory against the British in the Revolutionary War with the right-wing’s success in the Proposition 8 fight in California as being miracles “from God’s hand.” [Think Progress]

It seems a bit presumptuous, to me, that these guys seem to feel it is their duty, as angels of God, to try to tell the rest of us what is and is not good for us. Somehow I don’t think they, nor the United States, has been anointed by God.