Aka “I know you are but what am I” The following discussion is hardly anything new to those of you who’ve been following the netroots, blogs, online left, what-have-you for the past couple of decades. There was once an obsessive focus in those groups on “messaging” and how to combat what seemed to be the right’s mastery of the form. Nobody talks about it much anymore but it’s still an issue and this article is a decent reminder of that: By almost any measure, the struggle for political dominance in the US seems deadlocked between Republicans and Democrats. At times, the two parties resemble a pair of punch-drunk boxers, slugging away at one another in a contest that neither can end. 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…