Usually, August is a slow political month. Congress is in recess, the White House occupant is typically on vacation, and with the Biden administration, you wouldn’t notice the difference from any other month. The Supreme Court is on summer break, people aren’t focusing on much of anything, politically speaking. It’s just normally a dead zone for us pundits either in print or on the radio. Except for this summer, and this year.
If you want to ever know honestly how things are going for your side, whatever that side happens to be, one of your metrics has to be the seizing/pouncing index. That is loosely calculated to the number of minutes or column inches spent on a specific Republican, or conservatives in general, seizing or pouncing on an issue that is either uncomfortable or embarrassing for Democrats, and then divide that by the total minutes or column inches spent on that issue. If you are above 50%, you know you have the regime media playing defense, meaning you are right over the target and you’ve got a winning issue with the American electorate.
Republicans seizing and pouncing is a term of art that has been around for several years. Charles C.W. Cooke wrote about media using the phraseology towards Republican tactics as early as April of 2021 in the National Review.
Seizing and/or pouncing was the only way regime media could cope with the fact that Glenn Youngkin defeated heavy favorite Democrat Terry McAuliffe for the governorship in Virginia in late 2021. He seized on the education reform issue and pounced on poor Terry after the pandemic lockdown exposed what was going on in schools, and that school districts were covering it up. All that seizing and pouncing achieved critical mass, and the result was headline after headline attributing Youngkin’s victory to the seizing and pouncing rather than the fact he out-campaigned, out-hustled, and out-resonated McAuliffe with Virginia voters.
August, again going back to the slow summer theme, has been an unusually heavy month of seizing and pouncing by Republicans. Here’s just a sample on a variety of subjects, both nationally and at the state level.
LA Mayor Karen Bass Claims Conservative Press Is to Blame for People Feeling Afraid, Not Criminals
Republicans seize on transgender rights ahead of 2024
Republicans Pounce on Biden’s ‘No Comment’ on Maui Wildfires
Dishonest Soccer Fans Blame Republicans For Women’s World Cup Debacle
Regime media noticing Republicans seizing and/or pouncing hasn’t been lost on my HotAir colleagues, either.
NBC: Republicans sure are pouncing all over Biden’s “brand,” or something
WaPo: calling D.C. “The Swamp” is racisss…
Olivia Rubin over at ABC News made sure when David Weiss was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to be special counsel of cleaning up the rest of Hunter Biden’s mess, she noted the main problem with the appointment – Republicans seizing.
Meanwhile, over at CNN’s The Lead, Jake Tapper led a panel looking at Hunter and Joe’s growing influence peddling scandal, and glumly had to admit that perhaps Donald Trump was right about Joe and Hunter after all. Fortunately, the panel quickly pivoted to the real problem, which was Republicans seizing and pouncing on the issue.
That’s a lot of seizing and pouncing, and we’re only two-thirds of the way through August. CNN has just dropped the Nunchuks and taken seizing and pouncing international, with a story and headline stealthy enough to be deemed the way of the ninja.
John Blake laments the fact that the country is polarized and divided. Elections are decided by a whisker. Everything is basically tied, except for the art of rhetorical political debate.
But there is one political battleground where Republicans triumph virtually every time — and control of this arena could determine who wins the White House in 2024.
Republicans are masters of verbal jiu-jitsu. It’s a form of linguistic combat in which the practitioner takes a political phrase or concept popularized by their opponent and gradually turns into an unusable slur. Like the Japanese martial art known as jiu-jitsu, its devotees avoid taking opposing arguments head on and instead redirect their opponents’ momentum to beat them.
If this sounds abstract, consider the evolution of “ woke.” The word is defined as being “actively aware of social injustice.” But it has been transformed into a contemporary scourge, one that a politician compared to a “virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”
Mention almost any touchstone phrase adopted by the left in recent years — “critical race theory,” “diversity,” “global warming,” even the word “liberal” itself — and it has been redefined or tarnished by conservatives.
“Woke” is defined as being “actively aware of social injustice.” But Republicans have turned it into a slur.
Meanwhile, Republicans continue to proudly use words and pet phrases such as “family values,” “conservative” and “patriot” – no matter who or what is associated with the terms.
Let’s be clear. Seizing and pouncing mean you’re winning with the American people. It means you’re scoring points and resonating on issue sets on which people cast votes. If you’re seizing and pouncing, it’s a good thing. It means you’re on offense, not on defense.
To Blake, the idea that the agenda and terminology being used by the progressive left Is worthy of mocking and ridicule isn’t even an acceptable premise. There’s no attempt to use a modicum of common sense and see that the vast majority of the onslaught of progressivism, whether it’s the alphabet/gay/transgender movement, the environmental movement, the move to free all criminals in the country and only prosecute the ones with the last name Trump, it’s a disaster when deployed on society. All of this doesn’t make a lick of sense to a whole lot of Americans, including independents and even some liberals who see personally the effects of unabashed progressivism when it’s practiced, and vote with their feet to redder state pastures.
Apparently, the biggest lamentation is that the left has seemingly lost the ability to win rhetorical arguments. Why, oh why could that be, I wonder. Could it be that for the last couple decades, every Republican has had to deal with a media appearance as though it’s mortal combat with an enemy combatant? Contrast that with the softballs Democrats get tossed by media virtually every time. If one side of the political aisle is getting fastballs consistently thrown inside, and the other side gets whiffle balls set on a tee, eventually over time, one side is going to be a little better at hitting than the other side.
The solution to Blake’s problem is that regime media has to sweep the leg. You want Democrats to be better at this? Quit giving them a pass. It may be ugly for a cycle or two, but if you want Democrats to be better at argumentation, they have to be challenged by the press. I’m not even talking about being challenged harder. I’m saying they have to be challenged, period, because it’s not happening right now. There’s no reason for them to sharpen their argument and put in the work to make a stronger case if they have media basically to do that for them all day long. Why go through all that studying and hard work when there’s CCP honeypots to date, or CCP bioweapons labs in your state that have received $360,000 in tax credits? Why deal with all these hard issues when there’s Ukrainian bribe money to be made?
Republicans will begin the process of deciding who their nominee is once Iowa holds their caucus in January of 2024. If the national polls are remotely accurate, Donald Trump holds a sizeable lead, largely because he’s deemed to be by a plurality of Republican voters right now to be the best fighter in the field. That fighter has just announced on Truth Social that he’s skipping the debates because he’s got a big lead and doesn’t have to. That doesn’t appear at first glance to be keeping in fighting shape. That’s not doing the ‘wax on, wax off’ routine to the cars. That’s not painting the fence. That’s not side to side. There’s no honor in that. There’s no balance in avoiding debates. That’s staying off the mat entirely until you feel like you have no other choice. In short, it’s beginning to look like Trump 2024 will look be making America Joe Biden-2020 again. It might yet turn out to be a winning strategy, if for no other reason than Joe Biden is just that bad of a president and candidate at his age, but it probably won’t get the knowing Mr. Miyagi nod at the end.
