With the U.S. presidential election a mere 48 hours away, I want to take the opportunity to reclaim a piece of language that I feel has been wrongly taken from the American vocabulary by neo-liberals and neo-conservatives alike and used for the purposes of dividing people and closing conversations.  This kind of double-speak is not uncommon in U.S. society, and one need only consider the new connotations of words such as “freedom,” “patriotism,” and “democracy” to get the gist of how words can be distorted and appropriated by power-wielders for unethical purposes.  Lately, the word “bitter,” the focus of today’s blog, has gotten a bad rap in American society.  I find its recent appropriation to be similar to the ways in which “freedom” and “patriotism” have been distorted into terms that discourage folks from questioning the U.S.