Here is a line from the Pledge to America:
Rein In the Red Tape Factory in Washington, DC
So are we to visualize the House Republicans trying to get control of a factory, which produces red tape, pulling a carriage?
Listening on the radio to the Republicans announce the Pledge in Sterling, Virginia, I heard Rep. Jeb Hensarling, one of Congress’s stalwart small-government conservatives, invoke some similarly confused imagery. I can’t find a transcript, so I’ll just have to paraphrase, but he said in one sentence something like that the “American dream is drowning in a sea of red ink” and in the next sentence that “the Statue of Liberty’s torch is being covered with red tape.”
There has to come a point, when you are presented with cliches stacked upon cliches wrapped in cliches, when you wonder whether the speaker is trying to say nothing at all.
