How do the Republicans not see the irony of a so-called conservative party turning Orwellian? When will true conservatives take back their party?
Some selections:
"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote George Orwell in his prescient essay "Politics and the English Language."
Beset as we Americans are by a misguided war, errant governance, unaddressed environmental threats and growing social injustice, it is perhaps easy to downplay the importance of language in solving our problems in a rationale manner.
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell continued. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were to long words or exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
Consider the following terms born out of the Iraq War:
Camp Victory: The name of the huge U.S. military base at Baghdad International Airport might now be more accurately described as Camp Defeat.
Extraordinary renditions: A banality that hides the repugnant reality that allows suspects to be kidnapped, spirited abroad, interrogated and even tortured in a foreign country without any due process.
Information extraction: A euphemism that has come to be synonymous with the torturing of suspects into giving confessions.
Waterboarding: A term that while it seems to be describing some harmless recreation sport -- perhaps a cross between skateboarding and surfing -- is actually a cruel and unusual form of punishment.
GP
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