After my recent commentary on the pathology of socialism, I received a number of emails from people asking why some of their moderate friends, who are responsible, hard-working people, still seem to fall so often for the latest socialist sales pitch. In fact, it is the sales pitch itself that contains the answer.

It has to do with one of the fundamental tactics employed by the American Left - they avoid dealing with those annoying little details like the actual (often disastrous) consequences of their policies.  Instead they concentrate on framing every debate in terms of key words and phrases that focus-group testing has shown will resonate with people - emotionally.

Two of the most commonly employed terms are "fairness" and "justice" - we hear demands for "social justice" at every turn. Now, savvy conservatives know full well that "social justice" is simply code for socialism - dig into any organization that uses that phrase and, odds are, they are all about taking money from people who earned it and giving it to people who don't. But many moderates do not follow politics closely (that's why they're moderates), so the phrase sounds vaguely reasonable, perhaps even noble.

My current personal nomination for most deceptive language is "environmental justice"  - what that could actually mean is a mystery, but the Left uses it to justify every unutterably socialist intervention into our daily lives. The onerous "Cap and Trade" legislation, which will ultimately hit the poor the hardest, is but one example. Once again, whenever a leftist uses the word "justice" it is time to hold onto your wallet.

Do a Google search and you will see how many radical far-left groups have even incorporated the word "justice" into their names. It has become a reliable red flag (pun intended) - any organization so named is almost certainly a far-left socialist front group. There are even seminars and "social justice" training camps designed to recruit and train young people to become the next generation of socialists - a job with ACORN soon to follow, no doubt.

But don't underestimate the effectiveness of this seemingly childish approach. You need only look at the vacuous campaign of Barak Obama to see how a few mindless catch-phrases can be successfully employed - remember when journalists asked many of those moderates who ended up electing him to explain exactly what "Hope and Change" actually meant, and we got little more than incoherent ramblings. But it didn't matter. Obama got their vote.

A big part of socialist propaganda is founded on one of the most basic aspects of human nature: the desire to think of ourselves as, well, "nice" - admit it, we all do. And note that many of your genuinely kind and decent liberal friends are very much opposed to the screeching far-left harpies of MoveOn.org or the DailyKos - yet, these same people persist in describing themselves as "liberal." But why?

Because, after an all-out campaign by the Left to cast conservatives as "mean" or "heartless," your friends, both moderate and liberal, have come to believe that to be liberal is to be "nice." So it is easy to see, even for a moderate, how uncomfortable it would be to oppose something with the words "fair" or "fairness" in it - why, that would be downright un-American, wouldn't it?

On top of this clever linguistic chicanery, which is repeated over and over by their oh-so-willing co-conspirators in the mainstream news media, we have the endless promotion of liberal viewpoints on every major TV show - blatantly biased political messages are now subtly inserted into almost every episode. One recent example will make the point.

In an episode of "Criminal Minds" this past week, an "environmentalist" group was initially suspected of being part of a string of arson fires that killed several people, but naturally the cast quickly bends over backwards to assure each other (and us) that the killer could not possibly be part of the group. The main character, played by Mandy Patinkin, even goes so far as to assure the "environmentalist" group's leader (who, by the way, just happens to be dying of Leukemia - sniff, sniff, hanky please) that "You know, I support your cause."

But just in case you still didn't get the message (i.e. - that eco-whackos are really, you know, nice) the young, arrogant FBI "genius" character condescendingly explains to his (obviously less-evolved) colleagues, who still harbor doubts about the group, "they aren't 'eco-terrorists' - they're 'environmental activists.'"

Right. And the Columbian drug cartels are just "independent pharmaceutical distributors" seeking "economic justice."

Finally, those in the "moderate" camp desperately want to avoid seeing themselves as "extreme" - that's why they go for the comfort of that "middle ground" in the first place. They will remind you that "there are extremists on both sides" - while pointedly assuring you in the same breath that they have no intention of being in either of those camps. Thus they are easy targets of marketing campaigns that couch even the most radical socialist programs in terms that sound "centrist" or "reasonable" - even when they are anything but.

So it shouldn't take a rocket scientist (or a psychiatrist, for that matter) to see why so many of your politically uninvolved friends eventually absorb the underlying message - if you want to be "nice" and/or "moderate" you dare not oppose anything described as being about "fairness" or "justice."

We have a lot of work to do.