Thursday, August 31, 2006

Ever since Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld loosed his attack on appeasers Tuesday at the American Legion convention, the nation has been treated to analyses of the Bush administration's evolving rhetoric and focus on ideological warfare.

Listening to three Bush speeches over about 15 hours, we heard several times about the specters of Nazism, communism and fascism. Legionnaires and Utahns cheered the president on when he announced enemies wished to harm us, that they want to attack us in our own streets, that to pull out of Iraq would be to hand over the nation to Saddam's henchmen, that the dark forces of tyranny have got us surrounded.

Just for fun, we counted up the president's repetition of emergent memes, those little units of cultural information transmitted repeatedly from one mind to another. The numbers are conservative estimates from the third speech, the one at the Hatch fundraiser.

Terror or terrorists: 7 times
Ideological: 4
Tyranny or tyrant: 7
Extremists or extremism: 2
Struggle: 3
Enemy: 5
Threat: 7
Democratic or democracy: 3
Sept. 11: 1

-- Patty Henetz