DAVID HARSANYI: How Democrats Corrupt English To Create Hysteria.

How did so many liberals convince themselves that tax reform (a rare cut that is, according to sometime-reliable Washington Post factcheckers, only the eighth largest in history) signals the implosion of American life? Everyone tends to dramatize the consequences of policy for effect, of course, but a Democratic Party drifting towards Bernie-ism is far more likely to perceive cuts in taxation as limiting state control and thus an attack on all decency and morality. Taxation is the finest tool of redistribution, so it’s understandable.

There is a parallel explanation for the hysterics. With failure comes frustration, and frustration ratchets up the panic-stricken rhetoric. It’s no longer enough to hang nefarious personal motivations on your political opponents — although it certainly can’t hurt! — you have to corrupt language and ideas to imbue your ham-fisted arguments with some kind of basic plausibility.

Liberal columnists, for example, will earnestly argue that Republicans, who at this moment control the Senate, the House of Representatives, and White House thanks to our free and fair elections, are acting undemocratically when passing bills. As you know, democracy means raising taxes on the rich. Just ask all the folks who told us democracy died over the weekend.

But the most obvious and ubiquitous of the Left’s contorted contentions about the tax bill deliberately muddles the concept of giving and the concept of not taking enough. This distortion is so embedded in contemporary rhetoric that I’m not sure most of the foot soldiers even think it’s odd to say anymore.

“You never want a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel once said out loud. The “even if you have to manufacture it” was merely implied.