I’ve never been big on mob mentality, groupthink, mantras, reductive formulas or emotionally-charged slogans. But maybe it’s time to borrow a strategy right out of the Left’s playbook.

The next time you find yourself in a debate with a liberal, try throwing this up in his face: Obama lied, freedom died! The more they howl in protest, just keep shouting over them, repeating ad nauseam this pithy polemic. It’s time to set aside our logical arguments and facts, valid though they may be. Let’s get EMOTIONAL!

After all, it worked pretty well for the opposition. If I had a nickel for every time I heard the jingoistic phrase, Bush lied, people died, I could single-handedly pay down the entire national debt. Throw enough mud at the barn’s wall and, sooner or later, some of it is bound to stick. Dissolute plebes, more engaged in “reality TV” than reality itself, absorbed through osmosis this facile formula (double-entendre intended) being dispensed tirelessly by pundits and apparatchiks with their IV bags always at the ready stamped with the imprimatur “No thinking required!” (much let alone critical thinking). The message couldn’t help but seep into those porous, picayune brains. No wonder George Bush’s numbers dropped.

Let’s examine this catchy little epithet. The first proposition is disingenuous at best. In a world where reason prevails, the term “lying” normally implies deliberate deception. George W. Bush might be accused of “misleading” the country, but only in a once-removed and roundabout way. Sorry, there were no Machiavellian machinations. President Bush was many things; but the archetypal Trickster wasn’t one of them.

If anybody “lied” about WMDs—the motivation to go to war with Iraq in the first place—it was the intelligence community worldwide. Bush, along with the entire Congress, was privy to faulty intelligence, it later turned out. At the time, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Congress, having read the same intelligence reports Bush had, was more than eager to sign off on the war. It wasn’t until after the initially successful “shock and awe” military phase of the operation that the Democrats thought, “oh-oh”, we better start opposing this war because it’s making W look good.

The second proposition, “people died” is specious, a meaningless truism. People die all the time, particularly when there’s a war going on. I could make the case that—oh, I don’t know, pick a president—“Carter lied, people died”. Or how about “Truman lied, people died”? And just to be fair, “Calvin Coolidge lied, people died”. According to the Left, by definition, all politicians are “liars”. And millions of people die during any president’s tenure. So these formulations would be “true”—but meaningless.

The mantra I’m proposing here doesn’t suffer from these ambiguities. Obama clearly lied to us in so much as He campaigned as a benign moderate and now rules like a Czar. (I was thinking “tin pot dictator” now that we’re a banana republic, but “czar” seemed more charitable and in keeping with Barack’s regal demeanor.) And the consequence of His deception is the steady erosion of our basic and most cherished freedoms. Freedom will always be under assault in some quarter. And, historically, it hasn’t always been actualized for every single soul, even in America. But it is the one value that has—however imperfectly—defined us as a society and a nation for over two hundred years since this country’s inception. Up until now, that is. People are slowing awakening from their stupor and beginning to realize just what Obama meant by Change. In the meantime, freedom—not quite dead yet—languishes in the IC unit.

Footnote: Technically, freedom hasn’t been officially pronounced “dead” at this hour. But we can’t very well go around spewing our slogan, screaming “Obama lied! Freedom remains in critical condition but the prognosis is poor”, now can we?