The etymology of an all-too popular and surprisingly insidious pop-culture phrase, explored by the new blog (and like ours, a Sekimori design), Gotham Resistance.

"Now that the Obama Administration has taken power, it is critical for us to pay attention for how our language is being transformed before our eyes", The Gadfly Blog urges.

For some related thoughts, check out the conclusion of Byron York's recent interview with the man that Obama has apparently chosen to play Emmanuel Goldstein.

In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich writes, "A few months ago, before Barack Obama became the linguist-in-chief, I made a note to myself to write a column about the need to exterminate a pest."

And that pest's name? Enormity:

The problem wasn't new, but it seemed to be multiplying like mice. Suddenly, all sorts of people, pundits especially, were tossing "enormity" around with abandon. The enormity of the economic crisis. The enormity of the housing crisis, the layoff crisis, the banking crisis, various foreign relations imbroglios and Donald Trump's ego.

Every time another pundit said the word, I winced, not out of fear for my 401(k) but because I saw a battalion of newspaper editors and college professors, led by my 6th-grade teacher, Miss Birch, rapping on the pundits' enormous brains and shouting, "Enormity does not mean it's big!"

Because I was browbeaten in my formative years by such language warriors, I felt called to crusade to restore "enormity" to its proper meaning: "monstrous wickedness."

But I didn't get around to the crusade before Obama was elected, and now the truth is too huge to avoid: The battle is lost.

"I do not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead," Obama told the Grant Park crowd at his November acceptance speech.

Last Sunday, he violated Miss Birch's rule again, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial. "Despite the enormity of the task that lies ahead," he said, "I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure."

When the president of the United States--Harvard lawyer, deft writer, one of the most powerful people in the world--tells Miss Birch it's time to change, well, she might.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

A fine selection of "Words To Rest In 2009."

Michael C. Moynihan charts the strange birth and quiet passing of the P.C. "holiday."

Update: Ann Coulter claims vindication.

More: So does Kathy Shaidle.

In his profile of Paul Weyrich for the DC Examiner, Lee Edwards writes:

He was born on October 7, 1942, in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of working-class German Catholics. His father tended the boilers of St. Mary's Catholic Hospital for 50 years. He was politically active from an early age: at 19, he and his friends took over the Racine Republican party.

He worked for a local daily newspaper and then as a radio-television journalist before coming to Washington in 1967 as press secretary to Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).

He learned how to organize from the liberal opposition. During President Nixon's first term, he attended a meeting of key liberals planning the enactment of an open housing bill. Present were a White House official, a Washington newspaper columnist, an analyst from the Brookings Institution, representatives from several black lobbying groups, and aides to a dozen senators.

Weyrich noted that everyone took an assignment. The Senate aides promised that their bosses would make supporting statements and contact other senators. The White House official said he would keep everyone informed of the administration's strategy.

The newspaper columnist promised to write a favorable article about the legislation. The Brookings analyst promised to publish a timely study that would impact the debate. The black lobbyists agreed to produce public demonstrations at the right time.

"I saw how easily it could be done with planning and determination," Weyrich later recalled, "and decided to try it myself." With funding from conservative businessmen like Joseph Coors and direct mail assistance from fundraiser Richard Viguerie, he helped start major conservative institutions such as Heritage, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (later the Free Congress Foundation), the Senate Steering Committee, the Republican Study Committee, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Liberals as well as conservatives acknowledged his essential role. In January 1981, the AFL-CIO described the New Right and specifically the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress as smart, effective and responsible for "a whole passel of persons sitting in the U.S. House and Senate."

Well, one of the things is what I would call "media ricochet", which is the way real life and life as portrayed by television, by journalists like myself and others, begin ricocheting off of one another. That's why to me, in Bonfire of the Vanities, it was so important to show exactly how this occurs when television and newspaper coverage become a factor in something like racial politics. And a good bit of the book has to do with this curious phenomenon of how demonstrations, which are a great part of racial and ethnic politics, exist only for the media. In the last days when I was working on The New York Herald-Tribune, I'll never forget the number of demonstrations I went to and announced that to all the people with the placards, "I'm from The New York Herald-Tribune," and the attitude was really a yawn, and then, "Get lost". They were waiting for Channel 2 and Channel 4 and Channel 5, and suddenly the truck would appear and these people would become galvanized. On one occasion I even saw a group of demonstrators down in Union Square, marching across the Square, and Channel 2 arrived, a couple of vans, and the head of the demonstration walked up to what looked like the head man of the TV crew and said, "What do you want us to do?" He says, "Golly, I don't know. What were you going to do?" He says, "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You tell us."

Just found in my stats counter was this Google search (the abrupt cutoff is also in the original):

hitler and national socialism are really nothing more than contemporary shibboleths in america. whether invoked by thoughtless neocons i.e. goldberg's obnoxious screed titled ''liberal fascism'' or

The Business & Media Institute rounds them up; a Tech Central Station column by Arnold Kling from 2006 explains their origins.

In a related vein, Ronnie Schreiber explores "Myths of Organized Labor", memes which also derive from a similar ancestry.

"You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'"

Update: More from Roger Kimball.

One of Ace's co-bloggers writes that "The NHL Is No Longer Ace of Spades Lifestyle Compliant", because Dallas Stars player Sean Avery was suspended for--gasp!--using the phrase "sloppy seconds" to describe his former girlfriends?

(And you thought that the NFL was the No Fun League!)

But given that the NHL is the national sport of Canada, and that Canada is a nation where the "Human Rights" Commission will take up the case of an aging stripper suing her boss for being fired, is it all that surprising that the NHL would want to stick the boot that's on the cover of The Tyranny of Nice deeply into Avery's backside?

Building on Christopher Hitchens' new essay on the fate of Bombay, John Hinderaker asks what's in a name--in this case, a lot:

Hitchens clarifies something that I missed, for some reason: the origin of "Mumbai." I first realized that Bombay had been renamed within the last year or two when, on an airplane, I read an airline magazine article about "Mumbai," evidently one of the great cities of the world, but of which I was entirely ignorant. I figured it could only be Bombay. Hitchens writes:

When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995, that "those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay," he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it--after a Hindu goddess--Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta's work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay's hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")

This may seem like a detail, but it isn't, because what's at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world--a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan.

(For my interview with Jay from this weekend's edition of PJM Political on Sirius XM, click here.)

Marginalized Action Dinosaur has a Politically Correct Dictionary that's doubleplus worth your time. Viddy well, oh my brothers, viddy well--as they say in another distopian universe.

That's the New York Times' take on Rosie O'Donnell's variety show yesterday--and if Rosie bombed with the Gray Lady, Rosie bombed.

Of course, Hollywood's enemies list seems to be an ever-growing phenomenon, rendering the annual Hollywood blacklist movie even more hypocritical than it already was.

Even as science and common sense continue to dictate that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, Kathy Shaidle spots conspiracy buffs becoming ever more gnostic in their "analysis", obsessions, and, probably not surprisingly, their nomenclature.

Back in June, the liberal New Republic noted that Joe Klein took Time magazine's "Swampland" blog into the fever swamp, when he wrote:

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.

"Raised the question of divided loyalties?" Why doesn't Klein just come out and answer the "question," instead of cowardly using a vague, past tense construction, and say that a cabal of Jews agitated a War for Israel? His suggestion that they advocated "using U.S. lives and money to make the world safe for Israel" is the exact same sort of thing Pat Buchanan said about the First Gulf War (remarks that led his former mentor William F. Buckley Jr. to label him an anti-Semite).

More questions for Joe Klein. If the Jews with dual loyalties really ran our foreign policy, wouldn't they have pressed first for war with Iran, which presents a far graver threat to Israel than Saddam ever did? And how come so many non-Jews like Don Rumsfeld, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, the Kurds, just to name a few, all "plumped for war?"

I've never met Rashid Khalidi, but he is (a) Palestinian and therefore (b) a semite, so the charge of anti-semitism is fatuous.

I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not about to accuse Joe of being an anti-Semite, but I will note that this the first time I've ever heard a Jewish person, or a non-anti-Semite, make this sort of malicious statement, one that perverts the universal meaning of a term in order to mock the phenomenon of Jew-hatred. "Jew-hatred" is actually my preferred term, because, as I'm sure Joe knows, "anti-Semitism" was a term invented by the avant-garde Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr, who was the founder, in 1879, of the League of Anti-Semites, which argued that Germans and Jews were locked in a death struggle for racial superiority. And we know where that ended.

Since Marr's time, of course, the term has evolved from a compliment to an insult, but its meaning has held steady all these years. As I said, the only people who insult Jews by denying the meaning of the term are, in my experience, anti-Semitic. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, told me in an interview once that his organization could not be anti-Semitic, because Arabs were the true Semites, while Jews were simply European impostors. This interview occurred at a time when Yassin's suicide bombers were systematically seeking out large groups of Jews in order to murder them for the crime of being Jewish. By Joe's dangerous new standard, the World War II-era Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a Nazi fellow traveler and a frank advocate of total Jewish extermination, could not be called an anti-Semite because he was Arab. So, really, who's being fatuous?

I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble. However, emptying the term "anti-Semitism" of its accepted meaning in order to score points against John McCain? That's simply too much.

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

I've always thought socialism was an oft-used legitimate phrase to describe a wealth-distribution scheme involving high taxes and a command and control economy that placed onerous burdens on entrepreneurs and businesses, but was considered, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, much less bloody than the alternatives further towards the left. But lately, it's apparently become a codeword--but is socialism code for being black or being Muslim?

Let me know the definitive answer and get back to me, fellas.

Update: "Biden advises GOP to focus on economy, not attacks"--and yet when they do, they're smeared by Obama's surrogates, which makes for quite a Mobius loop.

Your bumper sticker of the day: "She is not a woman--She is a Republican."

Kevin D. Williamson spots "An Unbelievable Headline from Slate":

"Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy's health."

Incidentally, back in 2002, Glenn Reynolds suggested one simple method of reducing voter fraud:

The fact is, if you could come up with a new technology as simple and resistant to fraud as the paper ballot, people would be pretty impressed. So why do we use machines?

Perhaps in part for the same reason that some people used to prefer canned vegetables to fresh ones: "it's more modern!"

Couldn't paper ballots be sold to the left along similar lines? Vote the organic way--vote paper!

"Almost a year after two teenage girls were found dead -- allegedly executed by their father -- in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas, the FBI is saying for the first time that the case may have been
an 'honor killing.'"

Hey, remember a month ago when leftwing Hollywood puritans blew a gasket over a movie using the word "retard?"

Nahh, neither can I.

Update: And neither could Christian Toto, who also heard the Tinseltown crickets chirping in response response to the latest outbreak of the R-word.

Already a best-seller in Canada, something tells me that these could really sell like hotcakes in the US come November, particularly if the newest Obama logo were emblazoned upon them.

At Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet Of Fury writes that when Canadian author Howard Rotberg was accused of being a racist by a Canadian book chain's p.r. firm(!), he sued:

Rotberg believes that his suit is a much-needed challenge to the current neo-McCarthyesque climate, in which "racist" has replaced "commie" as the charge, judgment, and death sentence of choice. Like "commie," the word "racist" is so overused that its meaning is becoming lost; look at one judge's recent assertion that "devil's food cake" is "racist." And, like "commie," the word has become a source of amusement. (The blockbuster, Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q features an upbeat song entitled "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist.") With each passing day, Peter Brimelow's definition -- "A racist is a conservative winning an argument with a liberal" -- seems more apt than ever.

And yet, the word still has the power to make even the powerful tremble. Witness the "first black president" himself, Bill Clinton, feeling obliged to insist to ABC News that he's not a racist.

Rather than tremble in the face of accusations of "racism," Rotberg is fighting back.

BigMouthFrog looks at the audacity of symbolism, then and now.

Update: "Because When Germans Call a Charismatic Political Leader a Messiah, Good Things Happen." Heh.^TM

Actual Rocky Mountain News headline: "DNCC's Director of Greening experience questioned."

I hope she's up to the task:

Only three state delegations have agreed to eliminate entirely their carbon footprints by purchasing travel offsets, despite the pleas of convention organizers.

The heavily vegetarian "Lean 'N Green" menu has touched off a slew of gripes, ranging from caterers who can't find enough Colorado-grown organic vegetables to Denver City Council member Charlie Brown calling menu planners "the food police."

The biggest environmental disaster to befall the convention hit two weeks ago, when the Barack Obama campaign announced that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee would make his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High stadium.

The decision to move to the stadium threw a Chernobyl-sized wrench into the sustainability plan. Switching the venue from the Pepsi Center, which seats fewer than 20,000, to Invesco, which holds 78,000, threatens to saddle the convention with the Shaquille O'Neal of carbon footprints.

Democratic officials have remained tight-lipped on the environmental impact of the move, saying they're still crunching the kilowatt numbers.

Allah notes a familiar phrase has returned to Obama's lexicon: "essentially, spouses are civilians."

Much like Reverend Wright was, back in April. But as I noted back then:

How is Wright a civilian? When your ideology makes "the personal the political", and in an effort to create a holistic worldview, has politicized everything from religion to light bulbs to national defense, how can there be any "civilians" in politics?

By the way, Obama's use of the word "civilian" always strikes me as an odd Godfather homage, where the gangsters were careful not to take out anyone not actually in the mob. I.E., "Sollozzo knows he's a civilian." Ironically, and safe to say entirely unintentionally on Obama's part, it becomes an even more interesting word choice considering the rapidly escalating level of real violence back in his hometown.

Ezra Levant writes, "The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival":

As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean's. And so they did.

With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they're already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn't pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean's and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing their own political death sentence.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean's go. That's the first smart thing they've done; because the sooner they can get the public scrutiny to go away, the sooner they can go about prosecuting their less well-heeled targets, people who can't afford Canada's best lawyers and command the attention and affection of the country's literati.

For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgements on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

Update: "Isn't it funny how we're having more fun than the asshats trying to **** with us?"

While England has many of the same problems that inflict the bluer alcoves of America, fortunately, that enlightened bastion of reason and common sense has its priorities firmly in order:

A council has banned the term "brainstorming" and replaced it with "thought showers".

Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent was accused of taking political correctness to extremes after instructing staff to make the change.

The move came as council chiefs feared the word brainstorming might offend mentally ill people and those with epilepsy.

(Story via Dirty Harry's other blog; headline via Claude Rains.)

Recently, I linked to Jack Shafer's article in Slate, declaring Advantage: Michael Crichton:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media--specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances--"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"--swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Fortunately, as I noted in an earlier segment, they've already built their own Jurassic Park!

(And speaking of earlier segments, click here for older editions of the show.)

“[Inside the windowless courtroom] there’s no link with the outside world except a clock, which is stuck at 8:00. And that’s government bureaucracy for you. You know, in British Columbia, it claims to be able to eradicate hate, but it can’t get someone in to restart the clock.”

--Mark Steyn on The Hugh Hewitt Show, as quoted by Kathy Shaidle, who goes through the looking glass of his Kafkaesque Show Trial at Pajamas Media.

Meanwhile, reader Joseph Somsel emails:

Seems to me that some of the defendants from the Canadian Human Rights Commission trials could legitimately seek asylum in the US as victims of persecution.

Somehow I don't think Oswald Spengler (the one who wasn't a Ghostbuster) quite expected western civilization to enter its death rattles quite like this:

Some of the comments expressed the familiar desire to leave America for Canada. O Canada. Land of sweet reason and freedom.

You mean the place where a Human Rights Commission can haul up anyone for a show trial and cast out the rule of law and fine them for saying things that made people sad, then force them to recant their beliefs in public?

This ruling is just astonishing – a pastor has been barred for life from ever speaking his mind on a particular issue in any form – newspapers, radio, TV, the internet, semaphore signals. I doubt any halfway serious gay person would applaud it (update: proof.) The pastor in the dock said LGBT people “perverse, self-centered and morally deprived,” which seems a rather broad net to cast, no? It’s a self-refuting statement for anyone who knows anyone who’s gay, and if it had been leveled against straights by someone from the ranty fringe of, oh, I don’t know, Leather Bear Kluxers for Zoroaster, I wouldn’t have felt particularly wounded. You could argue with the fellow if you like, but the idea of bringing him up on charges for talking doubleplus ungood harmthink is absurd.

I know some believe that dissent has been crushed and driven to the margins in this country, but try to imagine a government agency charging Rev. Jeremiah Wright with hate speech for a sermon, and forcing him to disavow key elements of his church’s theology. It’s impossible, isn’t it? It would be different if he said those things on the radio, in which case the government agency responsible for determining Fairness would be required to enforce the airing of alternate opinions. And now, for the response to today's sermon.

It’s a messy world full of messy minds and loose tongues. Words can hurt, and we can’t have that.

It's not the only case before the Canadian HRC system, as noted; Mark Steyn and the magazione that runs his work is facing judgment from this pinhead star-chamber as well. But by all means: pop in your copy of "V For Vendetta" and pretend the dark Christian fascists will surge to power any minute now and use the surveillance infrastructure to justify limits on acceptable headgear. Any minute now. Any minute.

Update: Not long indeed: "Great Britain’s Free Speech Breakdown".

The Canadian Press notes, "The man whose controversial writing is at the centre of a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint is daring the tribunal to rule against him":

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress filed the complaint with the tribunal over an excerpt of Mark Steyn's book published in Maclean's magazine in 2006, saying it was hateful and showed contempt for Muslims.

"We want to lose," Steyn said Friday.

"We want to lose so we can take it to a real court and if necessary up to the Supreme Court of Canada and we can get the ancient liberties of free-born Canadian citizens that have been taken away from them by tribunals like this.

"We want those ancient civil liberties restored."

Steyn, who did not address the tribunal but was in the hearing room for some of the submissions, said he's "terrified" that the issue will be dismissed by the tribunal because the lawyer for the congress "put on such a staggeringly inept case."

Though not present for the entire five-day hearing, Steyn was not shy about how he feels towards the tribunal. He's called its members "pretend judges" and the system a joke.

"I think this court shames the province of British Columbia and is simply incompatible with the traditions of a great free society with a long, legal inheritance," he said outside the hearing room.

* * *

The hearing has been closely followed by members of the Muslim community.

Tarek Ramadan of Vancouver said that while hurtful things are often written about Muslims in the media, he was most offended by how Maclean's magazine dealt with the controversy.

"They're being a little difficult about giving the Muslim community a chance to rebut the article," he said. "Ideology should be faced with ideology."

(Via Steyn Online.)

Update: Video added above found via Feet Of Fury.

Tough to like, you know, argue with this:

Slightly sanitized below, but pithy nonetheless:

For many, many years I wrote cover lines, ad copy, captions, pet copy, and many other assorted items for Penthouse Magazine. From this experience (which is seared, seared!, into my memory), I think I am more qualified than 99.99% of all the human beings that have ever lived to know pure, prime, steaming hot bulls*** when I see it, and this sign delivers. As a former bulls*** artist second to none, I know power bulls*** when I see it, and I have to say this placard contains enough high-velocity bulls*** to drop a charging rhino at fifty yards.

"1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us":

Dr. Helen checks out Julia Gorin's new book, Clintonisms:

I spent the morning reading a new book by conservative comedian Julie Gorin called, Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Even Suspect Musing, of Billary. I generally don't go for these kinds of books that make fun of various presidents but this one was sort of catchy and funny--although if you like the Clintons, you may not see it that way.

In the introduction, Ms. Gorin states that we are faced with the real possibility of a second Clinton presidency and her book "attempts to preempt that reminder and at the same time examine the pressing issues and questions that may be revisited in the event of a second Clinton presidency..."

She notes that her book is not a scholarly work and is not meant to be fair or balanced. "It's a collection of anecdotes, reportage, jokes and first, second and third-party quotes from and about the Clintons." The anecdotes, jokes and quotes range from those "Defining the Clintons" to "With Peacekeepers like These..." which focuses on disturbing sayings from the Clinton's ideas of foreign policy. The hypocrisy of many of the musings is food for thought.

Even as Obama attempts to covert the masses to what the Washington Post calls "his own vision of patriotism", Roger L. Simon notes that "According to Reuters, Obama is trying to wrest the 'Straight Talk' mantle from McCain."

With straight talking all-American mentors like Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright, and his own wife's punitive liberalism, all I can say is, good luck with that.

Update: Does Barack have a temper isssue as well?

From a story invented by a Mr. G. Orwell for his first generation analog blog about 60 years ago:

You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'

Update: And speaking of Orwellian, though on the other side of the aisle*, Allahpundit looks at Ron Paul's fans to stop the world and get off: "How curious that their plan for the libertarian paradise calls for a quasi-communal organization via co-ops."

Ever four years, there's at least one article mentioning that the left hates to be called liberal; here's Rich Lowry's take from 2004 (which actually namechecks Obama, then a newly minted senator). And in the International Herald-Tribune (a Pinch of a spinoff from the NYT), here's this year's model: in addition to never mentioning his middle name, one must never use the L-word to describe Barry O in polite company:

Simon Rosenberg, who leads the New Democrat Network and is currently unaligned in the Democratic contest, argues, "My basic belief is the generation-long era of political domination, the ascendancy of conservative politics, is at an end, and Obama has captured more than anyone else the opportunity of this era." He added: "It's very hard to put labels on him. He's building his own sandbox." [Is he old enough to play in it unsupervised?--Ed]

Obama, in fact, had the support of 64 percent of independents in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll. But can that transpartisan appeal be sustained? He has only begun to take some hard political hits - from the Clinton campaign, from conservative commentators and radio hosts, and from Senator John McCain's campaign. The recent flare-up about his pastor's racial views was one example. And Republicans are just starting up their attacks.

"Nobody's yet taken him on as a liberal," said Andrew Kohut, who leads the Pew Research Center. "But McCain will."

So far, Republicans give every indication of planning to portray Obama as a big-government liberal out of touch with American values and unprepared to be commander in chief.

"When you're rated by National Journal as to the left of Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders, that's going to be difficult to explain," said Danny Diaz , a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

Related: Well, related conceptually, at least: "Kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure."

Found via the above "Day By Day" cartoon, Plumb Bob Blog has bobbed and weaved unto quite a plumb meme:

The short version of the screeching inversion is that the most immature among us get to pretend that they’re moral paragons, while the most mature are treated as moral pariahs, simply because the immature screech louder and a lot more often. Thus, in a morally deteriorating society, evil gets tagged as good, and good, evil.

Mark Steyn and Timothy Noah concur: "change" is an utterly meaningless word in presidential politics.

Meanwhile, via Kathy Shaidle comes your quote of the day:

"Barack Obama is a powerful speaker. So is my Bose Bass Amp."

Reuters looks at Tim Robbins' new film:

Have you ever dreamt of smashing up that car in your neighborhood whose burglar alarm has the bad habit of going off in the middle of the night?

U.S. director Henry Bean used to do that just that, breaking into other people's cars to disable their alarms, so he could get a good night's sleep. He ended up in court and in jail, until he decided to stop and make a film about it.

"Noise", Bean's provocative second film, casts Tim Robbins as David, an upper-class family man driven insane by New York's loud sounds -- grinding garbage trucks, horns honking, back-up beepers and worst of all, car alarms squealing at all hours.

Can't blame the movie makers for this, but note the article's headline: "Tim Robbins wages crusade against noise in new film". I thought the PC police (Reuters chief amongst them) banned the C-word, post-9/11.

Glenn Reynolds links to a post that contains a quote from 1978 which accurately predicted the death of the printed newspaper as the online world took off.

But long before the dreaded Days of Disco, Arthur C. Clarke made a similar prediction during the Johnson era.

As I wrote in "Atlas Mugged"--and thank you for all of the posts linking to it!--Clarke, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler had all made predictions as early as the mid-1960s which predicted the demise of the newspaper as a physical medium. And like the quote from the 1970s linked to above, they all went unheeded by the newspaper industry, which is paying the price today.

NRO's Phi Beta Cons blog links to Frederick Hess's article on the limits of what is commonly described in today's shorthand as "tolerance":

Writing on NRO today, Frederick Hess examines the recent flap at the University of Maryland, where a student wearing a pro-Israel shirt was indignantly told by a cashier at the Maryland Food Collective that "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up."

The student was able to get another cashier to complete the transaction, but the episode led to a big flap over the rights of customers and cashiers. A spokesperson for the Food Collective says, "no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful."

Many Jewish customers have refused to enter Rainbow Grocery — the hippie-dippy worker-owned cooperative that preaches an "inclusive environment that is welcoming to everyone" — ever since two departments de-shelved Israeli products in an apparent anti-Israel boycott in 2002. (Store employee Naomi Jelks says it was done without store authorization, and the boycott was later shot down by an employee vote.)

Now the Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint by ex-customer David Nahmod, who says he was called a "stupid Jew" more than a year ago by a cashier who employees say identifies as Palestinian. Nahmod, a 51-year-old freelance writer and dog-sitter, says he motioned to the woman's "Free Palestine" T-shirt and asked, "Wouldn't it be nice if they could all live in peace?" He alleges that she responded with the epithet and that suicide bombers should kill as many Jews as possible.

Of course, the above incidents could have easily have escalated into something even more insane: at least no latex balloons were involved in either transaction!

(H/T: GR)

In USA Today, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on Hillary's eschewment of the word "liberal" for "progressive". Which is progress of a sort--the left avoids the L-word like the plague during every election, a trend which dates back a surprisingly long time. When I interviewed James Piereson recently, he mentioned Kennedy's use of the "Missle Gap" fable to position himself as somewhat to the right of Nixon (and by extension, Eisenhower):

Kennedy saw, partially because of his father—his father was an arch-reactionary—that to be tagged as a liberal was a kiss of death in electoral politics, and he avoided that.

Clinton's answer taps into the common complaint on the left that the word "liberal" has fallen into disrepute not because of the policies of liberals, but thanks to the villainously cynical distortions of conservatives. "The greatest triumph that conservatives ever achieved," liberal columnist Clarence Page recently complained, "is to make liberals embarrassed to call themselves 'liberal.' "

Right. The failures of the Great Society, bussing, racial quotas, high taxes, the Vietnam War (both its beginning and end), Jimmy Carter's "malaise," the nuclear freeze movement, lax law enforcement, speech codes, abortion on demand, bilingual education and, of course, Michael Dukakis: We're expected to believe none of these things can be weighed against liberalism. Liberalism, after all, is never wrong. It must be those mustache-twirling henchmen Lee Atwater and Karl Rove who are to blame.

One might also ask, if Clinton laments how liberalism has become identified with big government, why it is she wants to revive the progressive label. After all, if liberal is a misnomer for statists, progressive represents a long-overdue return to truth in labeling. In Europe, after all, liberals are the free-market, small-government types. But in America, the same people came to be called conservatives in no small part because they were trying to conserve liberal ideas of limited government amid the riot of social engineering during the Progressive Era that Clinton is so nostalgic for.

Indeed, she's right that self-described liberals championed the sovereignty of the individual, which is why the authentic liberals were hated by progressives who believed that, in the words of progressive activist Jane Addams, "We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in the connection with the activity of the many."

As late as 1951, Sen. Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican" to his fans, insisted he wasn't so much a conservative as merely an "an old fashioned liberal."

Even so, progressives were more desperate to seize the l-word for themselves because they needed it more. They so ruined the word "progressive" — particularly during the excesses of World War I — that they had to abandon it like a rider leaving an exhausted horse behind. By the late 1940s, "progressive" became little more than a euphemism for a Stalinist or at least a useful idiot for Moscow.

Update: Speaking of updates to the Newspeak Dictionary, Ace has a modest proposal for the next edition of the AP Stylebook.

Back in 2002, when this site was just setting up shop, we linked to a Joanne Jacobs post on segregated college dorms, which in turn linked to this Suzanne Fields essay. Fields described Palo Alto's Stanford University as being a leading practitioner of social de-integration:

At Stanford, these dorms require a glossary for identification. Muwekma-tah-ruk is Native American, Ujamaa is African-American and Casa Zapata is Chicano/Latino. The Asian-American house is called Okada, named for the author of a book about the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, when they were sent to live in ethnic-themed resettlement camps.

Stanford students and administrators have been mildly embarrassed--there may be hope yet--since a civil rights organization exposed them in a study entitled: "The Stigma of Inclusion: Racial Paternalism/Separatism in Higher Education." The New York Civil Rights Coalition reports that color-coded universities encourage a "balkanized campus environment" and that minority students at Stanford are "indoctrinated" into a separate track for "special treatment" that many of them did not ask for, or expect, when they applied for admission.

"From those who believe that theme dorms represent a divisive form of self-segregation, to those who see them as paternalistic attempts by universities to improve minority students' chances of success in college," the Stanford Daily reports, "the system has a wide range of detractors."

In my Politics of American Government class last winter, I learned that there are limitations on our right of free speech, limits delineated by terms such as "fighting words," "clear and present danger" and libel. During that same term, I also discovered just how restrictive many college students' idea of free speech really is.

In an editorial for a school newspaper, I criticized how the school's four ethnic theme dorms (African-American, American Indian, Asian and Latino) stereotyped minorities by categorizing individuals by race rather than considering broader personal experiences and values. The response: How dare I condemn the established multicultural institutions on campus! Didn't I know that I had no business commenting on the issue since, as one student stated on a campus forum, I was just a "white, libertarian girl from the O.C." Considering how often students refer to their right of free speech when they criticize the school or presidential administration, their reactions to my article were stunning.

Setting aside the current working definition of "racist", in December 2002, when Michael Graham was promoting his then new book Redneck Nation, he told National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez:

In 1948, Strom Thurmond was a politician obsessed with race. The modern American liberal is obsessed with race. Strom Thurmond thought schools and courts should treat citizens differently based on their skin color. Liberal supporters of, among other things, race-based admissions policies and hate-crime laws agree. Strom promoted the "multicultural" view that institutions like Jim Crow and segregation might appear irrational or unjust to outside agitators, but they were a perfect fit with southern culture.

* * *

Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I know live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because "race matters." I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say "black people learn differently from white people." Gee, I haven't heard that since I was 12 — from a klan member!

I received so many caustic e-mails and messages the weekend after my article was published that my residential adviser actually asked me to inform him if I received any tangible threats. Luckily, these messages were just irrationally irate, not violent.

John Leo observes the New York Times "Swerving Around Riots":

In 1967, Newark erupted in gunfire, looting, and arson, killing 23 people and injuring 700. But 40 years later, the New York Times still is not certain that this event should properly be called a "riot." In a news article marking the anniversary, the Times reminds us that "frightened white residents" of the 1960s opted for the word "riot," while "black activists" of the period called it a "rebellion."

In a bracing slap at readers who unthinkingly might refer to several days of riotous behavior as a "riot," the Times quotes the president of the New Jersey Historical Society, Linda Epps, who says: "there is not one truth, and your view depends on your race, your age and where you lived." So what would fair-minded neutral people call it today? No need to wonder. The Times tells us: "Those seeking neutrality have come to embrace the word ‘disturbance.'" I can sympathize. Unaware that they may be giving offense, many Americans and Europeans still blithely talk about "World War II," with its aggressive and wounding reference to armed conflict. On the other hand, many German activists of the period preferred the term "unjustified trampling of the Third Reich's perfectly legitimate lebensraum and population control policies." Surely it is time for a non-provocative name for this troublesome six-year disturbance. How about "the multiple disagreements and tragic misunderstandings of 1939-1945?" Or perhaps "World Woe II," so we can retain the established initials.

Not surprisingly for a postmodern institution, the Times wants it both ways: they want to hold themselves out as The Paper Of Record, but simultaneously claim that there isn't one record of events. Pat Moynihan's famous quote is, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts". By stating (via their choice of quotes) that "there is not one truth, and your view depends on your race, your age and where you lived", (and Jim McGreevy would add sexual orientation to that list) the Times believes that everyone is entitled to their own facts. That's an awfully strange way to run a newspaper.

At least from my point of view.

As you'll discover if you click here and scroll through all of the posts contained within it, "The Newspeak Dictionary" has been the name of one of this site's organizational categories for a while now. And this post by "Gagdad Bob" will add many more items to its list.

(H/T: The latest edition of the "Carnival Of The Insanities", which is also well worth your time.)

Just to add more item to the Newspeak Dictionary, courtesy of the LA. Times, bloggers get yet another new name: "Informational Vermin". Add it to all of the existing epithets they've already been dubbed by their calm, enlightened betters in Old Media.

Is the box office for Angelina Jolie's paean to Islamofascist terrorism waning? I wouldn't say that. but I would say that its appeal is becoming more selective.

While Hollywood's moral equivalence seems like a permanent fixture, there's still a lot the filmmakers could have done to have improved the film's commercial potential and yet still maintain their radical chic credentials. A cameo by this recently deceased Middle Eastern media superstar would have done wonders for its gross.

Building on a post by Tim Blair, Mark Steyn writes that the New York Times has invented a whole new meaning for the word "disenfranchised":

Tim Blair provides a fine example of why The New York Times is an unreliable guide to the ways of the world:

In July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transit system, and another set of attacks failed two weeks later, bringing home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population. Witnesses said the two men in the Glasgow attack were South Asian.

My dictionary defines "disenfranchised" as:

to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, or of some privilege or immunity; especially : to deprive of the right to vote

The "South Asian population" are British subjects with as much right to vote as Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. If the Times is merely using the word to mean more generally "deprived", the July 7th bombers didn't exactly hail from the ghetto: Shehzad Tanweer rode around in his dad's Mercedes. Omar Sheikh, who's supposed to have plotted the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (ie, private) schoolboy and a London School of Economics alumnus. The four would-be suicide bombers who attempted a follow-up Tube carnage on July 21st 2005 were discovered to have "more than £500,000 in benefits payments" from the bountiful British welfare state in their bank accounts.

So the next editor of Webster's might like to include a new New York Times definition of "disenfranchised": "complacent liberal assumption designed to reassure readers that they can fit this story into all the old cliches about the usual root causes".

Update: Glenn Reynolds adds, "'Poor and disenfranchised?' Not so much: 'Two doctors held over bomb attacks.'"

Rick Moran links to John Leo's City Journal essay regarding Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's study on immigration and multiculturalism. Leo's article, and others on Putnam's findings have been making the rounds in the Blogosphere, but Moran concentrates on the professor's fear that he may have commited one seriously doubleplusungood thoughtcrime:

Rather than look at the study, I am more intrigued with the Professor’s hand wringing over the fact that his work tends to knock the chocks from underneath a pillar of leftist thinking; that by pigeonholing Americans and recent arrivals into their own special group while encouraging a separateness based on culture and language, tolerance and acceptance will automatically follow in the country at large. This has been an article of faith on left for 30 years. It has affected school curricula for children as young as pre-schoolers on up through the speech codes and diversity mandates found in the finest institutions of higher learning in the land.

And rather than accomplish anything, it has made things worse.

James Taranto writes that while Mayor Bloomberg "may not get many votes" during his run for the White House, "he'll get favorable enough press coverage to make John McCain jealous":

Bloomberg is so out of step with the GOP that he opposed the confirmation of John Roberts as chief justice. He is term-limited and thus cannot seek re-election, which means that the Republican line is no longer of any use to him. So why is it news that he is abandoning his Republican affiliation?

Because, according to the AP's Sara Kugler, "many believe [it] could be a step toward entering the 2008 race for president."

To make sense of this assertion, you need to be fluent in the dialect of American English known as Journalese. In Journalese, many can be either singular or plural, and it is a first-person pronoun.

Last year, Jonah Goldberg wrote, "Here's a short rule of thumb for how to tell who is a 'respectable' conservative in the eyes of liberals: any conservative out of power or not seen as supportive of those in power":

An even shorter rule of thumb would be: conservatives are respectable if they are useful to liberals. Pat Buchanan became respectable, even adorable, among a loose coalition of liberals leftists, from MSNBC's Chris Matthews to Ralph Nader, when he turned on the GOP establishment. Kevin Phillips, David Gergen and John Dean have been "real" Republicans — though rarely conservatives — for decades because they are willing to confirm the assumptions of liberals. An even more telling example would be the "neocons." Before the Iraq war, neocons were the nice conservatives, the good conservatives, the idealistic conservatives the un-racist conservatives, according to academics, The New York Times and others. This is not to say that they aren't nice, good, idealistic and un-racist. Rather, it's to point up the way in which conservatives become evil as they become influential, relevant, or otherwise inconvenient to liberals. John McCain was touted as a good choice for president by The New Republic and other liberal voices. Today, McCain is increasingly villified by many of these same voices because, it turns out, he's actually a Republican.

Similarly, William F. Buckley is suddenly the voice of humane and decent conservatism, according to liberals. A more humane and decent man, you'll never meet. But it's doubtlessly true that if WFB had the president's ear, the same voices cheering him would once again be calling him a fascist. And, needless to say, if Bush governed on Pat Buchanan's playbook, Chris Matthews would lose his crush on him awfully fast.

Fred Thompson explores the current state of freedom of speech--or lack thereof--on American campuses.

Related: Is the lack of free speech on campus a logical result of treating your politics as a religion?

A commenter on the Brothers Judd Blog coins a great variation on Godwin's Law:

The instant I even hear the word "neocon" brought up, I immediately dismiss whovever is writing / talking as having absolutely nothing of any interest or value to say. The entire "neocon" concept is a crock. It never existed outside of a few political journals until the Bush admin, and since then has served as a catch-all polite expression of anti-semitism, anti-Americanism, and certainly anti-Bushism (BDS?).

Neo-con! Booga Booga Booga! Hide the kids!

"Neo-con" is short for "turn the page now, and go on to to something worth reading".

Update: Further thoughts and links here.

Helpful note for our California readers: merely substitute the word "Dude" for "Mate" in Tim Blair's latest Sunday Telegraph column, and all of his linguistic rules will work for you, as well.

Building on George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language", John Leo explores how badly English has descended--particularly in academic usage--since Orwell wrote his seminal essay over 60 years ago.

Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Two words for anybody who thinks this immigration bill is a done deal, and there's no way enough opposition builds:

Harriet Miers.

Can you say cognitive dissonance? I knew that you could!

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function".

Of course, "function" is a relative term; Tim Blair explores those who take Fitzgerald's dictum to its extreme in a handy list of 30 contradictory concepts.

Update: Glenn Reynolds spots doublethink pressed into action for headline-writing duties.

Dr. Helen writes:

Congratulations to the Duke Lacrosse players--this travesty should never have happened--but it is gratifying to see these innocent young men set free today.

One thing I did find puzzling was the following statement by the North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper:

However, Cooper said no charges will be brought against the accuser, saying she “may actually believe” the many different stories she told. “We believe it is in the best interest of justice not to bring charges,” he said.

So if you charge someone with a false crime and "believe" your false statements to be true, you're off the hook?

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen are both riffing on the phrase "fur children" to describe what you and I normally refer to as pets. Glenn writes:

I ran across this term -- meaning pets you have instead of, you know, real children - a while back and was bothered. I mentioned it to a friend from DC, who remarked that it wasn't uncommon to see women, and even men, on the street with a cat or small dog in a baby carrier.

Great science fiction plot: Hostile aliens infect humanity with a virus that causes us to lavish parental attention on animals instead of human offspring, as a means of extinguishing the human race without a messy invasion. But it's just a science fiction plot. Isn't it?

UPDATE: Stephen Carter emails:

I spotted your item today about "fur children". In P. D. James's novel The Children of Men, set in a world in which no children can be born, there are two scenes involving women caring for pets as if they were babies -- not only walking them in strollers, but actually having them baptized -- and the narrator tells us that this is common behavior. I suppose the symbolism (to say nothing of the psychology) was too complex to risk trying to put this in the film.

What's funny is that behavior intended to symbolize an apocalyptic state has now become semi-normal.

The AP dispatch attributes the small number of children to high housing costs and Frisco's high prevalence of nonprocreative sexual orientations. Not mentioned is the Roe effect.

When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?

Update: Insta-Steyn-lanche! Welcome Glenn Reynolds and Mark Steyn readers.

Dean Barnett writes:

You remember George Lakoff, don’t you? Lakoff was the mastermind academic who officiously volunteered to help the Democrats remake America’s political terminology. I’m not sure any of the following can be laid at Lakoff’s feet, but his game was garden variety exercises in Orwellian stuff like referring to reckless government expenditures as “investments” or a troop surge as an “escalation” or surrender as “redeployment.”

But this time, they’ve gone too far. Yesterday on ABC News, Dianne Sawyer did a glowing puff piece on the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi may dress like she owns stock in Chanel, but worry not – according to Sawyer she’s “galvanized steel with a smile.” At one point in the interview, Pelosi talked about the Congressional Medal of Honor that was posthumously awarded to Jason Dunham last week. Here’s how Pelosi described Dunham’s heroism:

“I just had the privilege of meeting with the family of the young man who received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He jumped on a hand grenade and saved the lives of his other young people in his unit.”

I know the Democrats have developed as one of their pet Lakoffian tics the habit of describing our warriors as defenseless children. Thus, when Pelosi refers to Dunham as a “young man” and the men he saved as “other young people,” she’s merely falling into a bad habit.

But it’s a real bad habit; a truly offensive one. This is a matter of more than just mere semantics. Jason Dunham was a soldier. So, too, were the men he saved. They see themselves as warriors, and that’s what they are. The term “young people” is meant to demean them, and in Dunham’s case denies him the dignity that he has so completely earned.

We've remarked frequently upon the tendency of war opponents to infantilize American servicemen--by demanding, for example, to know why President Bush hasn't "sent" his daughters to fight in Iraq, as if he had the power as their father to order them to enlist.

In truth, members of the military are adults who have made an adult commitment. They deserve to be respected for their maturity, not patronized as victims. It dishonors them to use their sacrifice as a political cudgel.

It's interesting to track the changing face of war veterans. When they returned home from World Wars I, II and Korea, the were young, brave professional men who served when their country needed them.

In the seventies, after Senator Kerry's "Winter Soldier" speech, the left defined them as war criminals who:

personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

And now? According to Hollywood, they're children. Check out the messages on the signs carried by Hollywood celebrities protesting in Crawford last week in these photos: "Bring Our Children Home" and "'Before One More Mother's Child Is Lost'--Cindy Sheehan".

To understand what a radical transformation this is for Hollywood, consider how the sixties, that most golden of decade for the left, fetishized youth culture. 1967's Wild In The Streets promulgated the notion of a 24-year old rock star millionaire who gets elected after first securing the vote for 15 year olds.

Well, 15 year olds still can't vote, but 18 year olds can, thanks to the 26th Amendment, signed into law in 1971. In 1966, Time magazine named those "25 And Under" as its "Man of the Year". "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" was a cliché of the era, and heck, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's original 1967 novel of Logan's Run envisioned a whole society where the maximum age that could be reached was 21.

But that was then.

* * *

In the sixties, Hollywood sought to empower youth; well, a soldier who volunteers to serve his country, and in the process learns a battery of skills ranging from operating or repairing high tech machinery to operating weaponry the very thought of which would cause an NRA-hating actor to loosen his bowels is pretty darn empowered.

Too bad Hollywood can't see that. By the way, now that they're children again, shouldn't we raise the voting age? The driving age? Change the NC-17 rating to NC-25?

Boxer's illogical detour allowed her to not-so-subtly advertise her motherhood in line with the reigning mommy-rhetoric of the Pelosi Era, in which "the gavel" is in "the hands of America's children."

The "it's all about children" meme must focus-group really well, because Democrats keep trotting it out (most famously to justify welfare payments for "children," even though it's adults who get the checks). I don't remember Mommyism winning any national elections, though--especially during a war.

Boxer also managed to leave the implication that if only her children were of the right age, they would of course be volunteering to serve their country in the military. I don't know Boxer's childen, but I'm skeptical.

It's common to call Democrats "The Mommy Party". Who could have imagined during the 1960s "Youth Movement" that they'd take the title so seriously?

Attempting to defend her much-publicized attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice due to Rice's lack of children Thursday, Barbara Boxer invoked one of the hoariest clichés in the political lexicon:

Asked if her exchange with Rice was, as some suggest, a personal attack, Boxer insisted it was not.

“I spoke the truth to power,'’ she said. “Condi Rice is in the room when George Bush decides to send 20,000 more of our beautiful men and women into the middle of a civil war.

“And I’m not going to apologize for making an extremely clear point,'’ she said.

What bugs me is the self-congratulation. If one of the most powerful pols from the most powerful state in the most powerful country on earth can assume the mantle of “speaking truth to power,” then what’s left of “power”? Is that just a synonym for “Bush” now?

The phrase "speaking truth to power" goes back to 1955, when the American Friends Service Committee published Speak Truth to Power, a pamphlet ii at proposed a new approach to the Cold War. Its title, which came to Friend Milton Mayer toward the end of the week in summer 1954 when the composing committee finished work on the document, has become almost a cliche; it has become common far beyond Quaker circles, often used by people who have no idea of its origins. (One current example: Anita Hill entitled her memoir of her sensational charges of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Speaking Truth to Power.)

To speak truth to power sounds so much like an integral part of Quakerism that some modem Friends have simply assumed the phrase goes back to the seventeenth century rather than arriving late in the middle of ours. It reflects what many contemporary Friends would like to believe is the characteristic Quaker stance toward political authority, hallowed in practice if not the exact words. Yet in its origins it was a political statement, entitling an explicitly political document.

Let me recall the origin of the phrase. According to Steve Cary, the phrase just came to Milton Mayer one day, as he was thinking about the pamphlet. Everyone on the drafting committee liked it and asked where it came from.

Milton Mayer thought he recalled it from some early Quaker writing, but no one subsequently found it, though Henry Cadbury made several attempts to find the phrase. In short, it would seem to have been original with Milton Mayer, though in sound and attitude it feels like an authentic expression of early Quakerism. It has its meaning for us, in part, because it is so concentrated and vivid an expression of an attitude toward government and other institutionalized forms of power. Surely it was the perfect title for a pamphlet challenging the behavior of the two antagonists of the Cold War. They represented raw, terrifying, unreflective and deadly power. What was called for to transform that power was bold and uncompromising truth.

Update: Assuming deliberate satiric use of the above phrase in question is exempted, this seems a more than fair consequence if it continues to be used in the future.

The L.A. Times writes:

President Bush quietly appointed television sitcom producer Warren Bell to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this week, overriding opposition from public-broadcasting advocates who fear the outspoken conservative will politicize the post.

Betsy Newmark writes:

There still are many people who regard the UN as some sort of moral arbiter of a nation's behavior. Those who have paid attention to scandals such as the oil-for-food program or UN peacekeeping forces raping women and girls already know how little moral authority the institution has. Anyone who still thinks that there is some sort of higher ethical foundation at the United Nations will perhaps notice the bitter irony of having Ahmadinejad address the institution which he has played so skillfully while pursuing all the while the very goal that the UN supposedly has resolved Iran should not achieve.

Indeed^TM.

In related news, Tim Blair notes that International Committee of the Red Cross is also in search of the elusive--very elusive--"moral high ground", which they hope to reach by removing at least one incriminating photograph of their "attacked" ambulances from their Website.

Jeff Goldstein writes:

It seems some in the legacy media are entering into that next phase of narrative manipulation—a redefining of terms in order to 1) provide revisionary cover for its ideological fellow travelers, and 2) to fabricate and then facilitate a bandwagon effect. For instance, The New York Times this morning editorializes on the Lamont victory this way:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction.

An “uprising” of “moderates”? Come now.

Vital Perspective, and Pamela of Atlas Shrugs have maps showing the extent of Israeli damage to Beirut--and it's staggeringly small. As Vital Perspective notes:

We've gotten a few emails from astute readers who say that our previous Beirut map was limited to the Beirut city limits. This is true. At the same time they claim the southern suburbs have been "decimated" by the Israelis. This map and supplemental information compiled by highly astute authorities on the issue negates those claims.

Speaking of Charles Krathammer, in his latest Washington Post column, he writes:

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

The Powell Doctrine simply asserts that when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve overwhelming force against the enemy.

For more thoughts and links on proportionality, don't miss this post by The InstaProfessor.

Geez, shades of Apocalypse Now's famous "Terminate with extreme prejudice" scene: AllAfrica.com writes that a girl of age 20 (some reports claim she was as young as 14) was "prematurely terminated": a euphemistic way of saying she was stoned to death by irate youths in Nigeria--whose religion is curiously not listed in some local reports.

As others have written, it does a bit of a disservice to call this kind of language Orwellian--Orwell himself would be horrified at the turns that language has taken in the years since his death.

Update: Err, as I was saying...

'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: Of the Dennis Prager essay that the above passage links to, Dr. Sanity writes:

Praeger still refers to them as "liberals", a term I am careful not to use to describe the left. The classical liberal tradition is alive and well elsewhere--permeating both neoconservative and libertarian intellectual thought.

Living out the scene in last week's South Park in which the townspeople vote to bury their heads in the sand rather than face the issue head-on, the European Union plans to make Islamic terrorism disappear. Not the actual use of guns, knives, explosions and burning Peugeots in furtherance of terror, of course. Simply the actual words, "Islamic terrorism". And Islamofascism will be going away as well--not al-Qaeda (that's what the continental dormitory has America for)--just the word "Islamofascism".

As Syme once said to Winston, did you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?

(Of course, other religions have had their language impacted by the EU as well, which has never met an edict it didn't like. Last year, the EU announced that Christ's name must be spelled with a lower case-C, err, c, and Jews be capitalized when referring to nationality, but when referring to the religion, spelled with a lower-case "j".)

Update: Jeff Goldstein is absolutely spot-on:

We control words. They should not control us. And when words are controlled by our intent, those who take issue with their own particular misinterpretations of our intent can no longer claim that the fault lies with the utterer—the practical implications of which are that we no longer have to twist ourselves into knots trying to prevent giving offense by self-censoring our criticisms.

This puts the onus of “tolerance” on the listener, who is forced to accept valid criticism as a product of free expression. No one has a right not to be offended. And in fact, in our country, the First Amendment is meant to protect the right to offend, within reason.

By reasserting the locus of meaning linguistically and philosophically with the person responsible for formulating the meaning, we can begin to reassert the essential tenets of classical liberalism, which resist collectivism and wills to power by re-establishing the individual as the focus of liberty.

Going in the other direction—which we’ve been doing for the last nearly 40 years—only leads to the kind of totalitarianism that favors those who wish to control us through a control of our expression.

Another Update: Heh^TM.

The Freepers have an interesting look at some of the techniques used to inject bias and opinion into what should be a straight piece of newspaper reporting.

On another front in the language wars, The Anchoress notes that the lyrics of "Amazing Grace" have fallen prey to the forces of political correctness.

As she writes, "God forbid we should feel a little bad…"

We don't often have guest bloggers here, but a Mr. W.T. Pooh asked us to make an exception for one of his acquaintances:

Much more here and here; related compare-and-contrast post here.

Daniel Henninger explores how the spirit of 1968 has taken us to James Frey, Oprah Winfrey's favorite author, whose best selling A Million Little Pieces has been proven to be a million little lies.

But as Henninger writes, Oprah stands by her man, as do thousands of her fans:

Much support for the book on Ms. Winfrey's Web site comes from persons recovering from addiction or from family members; all found solace in "Pieces." Drug and alcohol hells are bad places to be, with no common solution. The road out is often arduous, and one is hard put to gainsay what works for these folks. That said, Oprah's site also carries many unforgiving comments from these same people. "What good would a book of lies do," one of them asks, "for someone who's trying to learn to live without them--who's trying to be honest and stand up for maybe the first time in their lives?" Another said it contradicted Oprah's "essential message: to live in truth of ourselves." Oprah's loyalists are a lot more interesting than they are often given credit for. One woman, the wife of an alcoholic, cut to the chase: "James Frey lied. He is accountable for his actions." Or used to be.

The reaction among writers has been as intense, with most of their criticism hammering at the publishing industry's greater willingness to erase the line between fiction and fact. Doubleday issued what one might call a businesslike "net-net" version of the new, saleable world of false facts; it referred to the power of the book's "overall reading experience." The publishers argue, and some writers support them, that the consuming public's changing tastes are forcing these category changes. Publishers are simply following the market.

In this view, fiction or even traditional nonfiction isn't providing the hyper-real narrative many people now crave from an assembled memoir like "A Million Little Pieces," no matter that it has been proven a fraud, or at least a fraud as formerly understood. But perhaps this suggests some people can't handle the truth anymore, so they'd just as soon be lied to so long as the lies fit their belief system, such as belief in the power of personal "redemption."

* * *

What's a fraud now--and what's something else--has become a question worth pondering. We live in a world of reality TV shows, of newspaper photographs and fashion photos routinely "improved" by the computer program Photoshop, of nightly news that pumps more emotion than fact into its version of public events such as Hurricane Katrina, hyper-real TV commercials manipulated with computers, the rise of "interpretive" news, fake singers, fake breasts, fake memoirs. Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York described this world as "always at the edge of falsehood" and so people come to tolerate it "as part of the overall media buzz of their lives."

He's right. But there is a political dimension to this, which many of what are no doubt politically liberal writers upset at James Frey and Doubleday ought to consider. Before all this, most people operated from a common personal standard, a broadly held superstructure of right and wrong, integrity and dishonesty, which they probably learned in Sunday school. You can see and hear it in hundreds of old Hollywood movies. "The Maltese Falcon," written by Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, is full of this moral tension and resolving clarity.

We all know those widely shared categories were broken and blurred the past 38 years, leading to terrible political fights between social conservatives and liberal liberators over disintegrating standards of personal behavior. Welcome to what it has wrought: The mass marketers and their accepting publics are skipping past the politics and simply pocketing the value added in the new controlling value--whatever "works" for us personally, no matter how meretricious. It's hardly James Frey's fault that the culture really is in a million little pieces.

(H/T: The Anchoress.)

James Taranto notes curious--if sadly, not very surprising--language from the wire service whose post-9/11 performance has been, to say the least, problematic:

Yesterday we noted that a Reuters dispatch, titled "Iran's President Questions Holocaust," included this sentence: "Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust." A later version of the dispatch, however, deleted the words "Historians say" and presented the Holocaust as fact: "The Nazis killed some 6 million Jews during their 1933-1945 rule."

But today, Reuters has a new formulation:

Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Regarding this widely-accepted view, Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency IRNA . . .

Reuters, of course, famously forbade its "reporters" from referring to the Sept. 11 attacks as an act of terrorism. "We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field," said Stephen Jukes, the "global news editor," in September 2001. Apparently Reuters thinks Holocaust deniers are entitled to a "level playing field," even if that means downgrading a historical fact to a "widely accepted view."

Update: Related thoughts from Roger L. Simon, and Hugh Hewitt.

A few times recently, I've come across essays on the Web concerning ancient history, listing the birth and death years of famous men of the late Roman era followed not with B.C. and A.D., but the letters B.C.E. and C.E.

As usual, I'm late to the party, but an Associated Press article explains the latest round of newspeak from academia's P.C. cleanup police:

Here's two otherwise unrelated posts which demonstrated how limited speech can be these days on campus. First up, Stefan Beck looks at "God and Man at Dartmouth":

Yesterday I wrote on NRO about a recent (actually, ongoing) dust-up at Dartmouth College. The short form is this: Noah Riner, the president of the student body, gave a convocation speech to the class of '09. The speech mentioned Jesus--and all hell broke loose:

Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner's address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn't even listen to these things. As it happens, I couldn't have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth's "Verbum Ultimum" allowed that "Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him." But he chose an "inappropriate forum" — perish the thought — and "[preached] his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Clearly, Riner is corrupting the youth of Hanover. Somebody fetch the hemlock.

Two words. At Bucknell University, that's all it takes to get dragged into the President's Office for a half-hour discussion of word choice. And these aren't offensive words, at least not out here in the real world. But Bucknell apparently has a different definition of what is and is not acceptable.

On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan "hunting terrorists." Those two words--"hunting terrorists"--resulted in three students being called to Bucknell's Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.

According to the students, when they arrived at the President's Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said "we have a problem here," telling the students that the words "hunting terrorists" were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.

(When contacted, Ms. Owens did acknowledge that the meeting took place, but refused to answer any questions about what transpired. She did not deny the account of the students.)

Last year, while collecting footage for my upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I noticed that the campus was plastered with flyers that screamed "vagina" in large block letters. Although some people might find these flyers offensive, it is protected speech at Bucknell--as it should be--but apparently the phrase "hunting terrorists" is not.

(Perhaps someone should remind Bucknell's administrators that the American soldiers who are "hunting terrorists" are fighting the very sort of misogynistic thugs who would gladly stone a woman to death for talking about her vagina in public.)

For years, Bucknell has denied that it has a speech code, the speech-stifling regulations that many schools use to punish political speech they don't like. But if Bucknell isn't in the business of restricting free speech, then why did these students have to spend 30 minutes listening to criticisms of the phrase "hunting terrorists"?

Most students I know would prefer not to spend their time defending their speech in front of highly-placed university administrators. By taking this action, the Bucknell administration is sending a signal to students: say only those things we approve of, or we will hassle you. The long-term effect will be that students will think twice before engaging in political speech that they know will be unpopular with the administration.

Currently up on Breitbart.com is this:

Judge: School Pledge Is Unconstitutional
Sep 14 2:20 PM US/Eastern

By DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was ruled unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge who granted legal standing to two families represented by an atheist who lost his previous battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

(It's highly likely, of course, to be overturned. And somewhere, Karl Rove is laughing like a giddy schoolgirl over this...)

Update: Michelle Malkin has lots 'o' links on this, including this one, from Ankle Biting Pundits:

The lefties in the Senate and the groups against Roberts have to be PO'ed. This news is going to overshadow their other messages against Roberts - and now they're going to have to play defense because you know this is going to be the 1st question that they are asked about.
You know these kooks agree with the decision, but they can't say that.

This also bodes well for President Bush picking a very conservative replacement for O'Connor. If he's got a short list he should make his selection quick while the iron is hot and it will be much harder for the loons to say his judicial choice is "out of the mainstream".

Glenn Reynolds agrees that Karl Rove has to be loving this turn of events:

KARL ROVE MUST HAVE ARRANGED THIS: Just as John Roberts is being quizzed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, another court declares the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

Back on Christmas of last year, I quoted from Mark Steyn, on how the actions of the ACLU and the Ninth Circus actually strengthen Christianity in America:

But every time some sensitive flower pulls off a legal victory over the school board, who really wins? For the answer to that, look no further than last month's election results. Forty years of effort by the American Civil Liberties Union to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicised Christianity in America. By "politicised", I don't mean that anyone who feels his kid should be allowed to sing Silent Night if he wants to is perforce a Republican, but only that year in, year out it becomes harder for such folks to support a secular Democratic Party closely allied with the anti-Christmas militants. American liberals need to rethink their priorities: what's more important? Winning a victory over the kindergarten teacher's holiday concert, or winning back Congress and the White House?

Another Update: Hugh Hewitt agrees with ABP that President Bush should strike while the iron is hot.

One More: Political Teen looks at the continuing tyranny of the minority:

Athiests account for 902,000 or 0.4% of the US population. Those who believe in a God or some sort of a higher being account for over 86% of the US population. It is amazing that such a small minority can rule over a large majority.

The deal here isn’t just the small amount of atheists in America, but the fact that they have to punish everyone for something they don’t believe in. If you do not want your child to recite the pledge of allegiance, then tell them not too. No one forces your child to stand up, put their hand over their heart and say 20 seconds worth of American patriotism. Thank God I go to a private school.

John Leo looks at how the press airbrushed the most extreme language out of quotes by Cindy Sheehan (hey, remember her?):

Sheehan, before and after her arrival in Texas, said a great many colorful things that failed to interest mainstream reporters. Some of her acid comments registered with the public mostly because of George Will’s powerful column of August 25 and his similar comments on the Sunday ABC TV news show This Week. A few made it on to cable news. Others simply failed to make it into the mainstream media. It’s worth reviewing what she said: The neocons deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks of 9/11. American soldiers are “being sent to kill innocent people” in Iraq. Her son, Casey Sheehan, “died for oil” and was “murdered” by President Bush. The United States is “not worth dying for.” The president, who “stole the election,” is part of the “Bush crime family,” a “lying bastard,” a “führer,” a “filth spewer,” “the biggest terrorist in the world,” and an “evil maniac” who is guilty of “blatant genocide.” Sheehan also compared Lynne Stewart, the radical lawyer convicted of aiding terrorists, to Atticus Finch, the heroic lawyer who battled racism in the book and movie To Kill a Mockingbird. She has been accused of making vaguely anti-Semitic remarks, but she attributes those remarks to her political opponents. On Hardball, she said the American attack in Afghanistan was “almost the same thing” (i.e., just as evil) as the invasion of Iraq.

Extreme politics. The mainstream media’s lack of interest in these little verbal grenades is astonishing. According to a computer search, not one of them made it into news coverage by the New York Times. The Times has a public editor, or ombudsman, who might want to ask why. One explanation for the news failure is that the media wedded themselves early to a simple narrative line-the president, holed up on his ranch, refuses to meet with and comfort a grief-stricken mother. This narrative became frozen in cement when columnists of the left began talking about the “moral authority” of a parent who loses a son in war. This story line-moral mom versus stone-hearted president-didn’t allow much room to note Sheehan’s great contempt for America. There is also the vituperation she has been showering on Bush for years. She campaigned against him in 2004, vigorously promoting his impeachment, not seeking a meaningful heart-to-heart chat with the “evil maniac.” Nor did reporters point out that Bush would set himself up for more abuse if he sat down with Sheehan, probably in the meeting and surely in the press conference afterward. By sticking to the anguished-mother story line and declining to publish her outlandish verbal abuse, mainstream reporters protected the public from an inference that would otherwise been obvious: that Sheehan had either gone around the bend psychologically or, more likely, had simply thrown in her lot with the extreme America-hating left. Whenever the mainstream media inched toward actual information about what Sheehan was up to, they employed the familiar “conservatives are claiming” construction, not directly reporting Sheehan’s odd comments and extreme politics.

On the whole, the mainstream media depicted Cindy Sheehan as a moral figure without blemish. Maybe reporters and editors felt paralyzed by the “absolute moral authority” rhetoric or justified by polls showing declining support for the war. Some reporters, of course, detest Bush and oppose the war. For whatever reason, they weren’t able to break from the original soft narrative line about a mother’s grief and tell us what was really going on.

Via "Best of the Web Today":

Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word "guerillas." As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms "insurgents" or "guerillas" to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase "paramilitary death squads." Same murderers, different designations. Yet of the two, "insurgents" and especially "guerillas" has a claim on our sympathies that "paramilitaries" lacks. This is not semantics: imagine if the media routinely called the Sunni Triangle gunmen "right wing paramilitary death squads." Not only would the description be more accurate, but it would offer the American public a clear idea of the enemy in Iraq. And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war.

Supporters of the conflict in Iraq bear much blame for allowing the terminology---and, by extension, the narrative--of events to slip from our grasp and into the hands of the anti-war camp. Words and ideas matter. Instead of saying that the Coalition "invaded" Iraq and "occupies" it today, we could more precisely claim that the allies liberated the country and are currently reconstructing it. More than cosmetic changes, these definitions reflect the nobility of our effort in Iraq, and steal rhetorical ammunition from the left.

The most despicable misuse of terminology, however, occurs when Leftists call the Saddamites and foreign jihadists "the resistance" What an example of moral inversion! For the fact is, paramilitary death squads are attacking the Iraqi people. And those who oppose the killers--the Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, members of the Allawi government, people like Nour--they are the "resistance." They are preventing Islamofascists from seizing Iraq, they are resisting evil men from turning the entire nation into a mass slaughterhouse like we saw in re-liberated Falluja. Anyone who cares about success in our struggle against Islamofascism, or upholds principles of moral clarity and lucid thought--should combat such Orwellian distortions of our language.

The second part of James Taranto's three part retrospective of the first five years of the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" column is online, focusing on the moral equivalence that's been the mark of a few elements of the fringe far right, but a growing component of much of the post-9/11 left:

Filmmaker Michael Moore explains on his Web site that his first reaction was to think the terrorists should have killed more Republicans:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

Why kill them? Why kill anyone?

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jerry Falwell as telling his fellow televangelist Pat Robertson: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " Robertson's reply: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government." The mirror image of the Falwell-Robertson calumny is a press release from the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which declares: "The terrorist disasters of September 11 may well have been the ultimate 'faith-based initiative.' "

It's worth noting that Falwell and Robertson both apologized, and that both remain fringe figures of the American right. Moore, on the other hand, did not apologize, as far as we remember; he did quietly remove the offending passages, and later the entire Sept. 12 posting, from his Web site. Much of the Democratic establishment later embraced Moore, as we noted recently: He had an honored seat next to former president Jimmy Carter at the Democratic Convention, and when his agitprop film "Fahrenheit 9/11" had its Washington debut, then-senator Bob Graham of Florida observed that "there might be half of the Democratic Senate here."

In their competition with Reuters and the New York Times to see which "objective" international news agency can appease Islamofascist terrorists the most, the BBC has airbrushed the T-word right out of their coverage of last week's savage terrorist attack casual bombing amongst otherwise good friends in London.

Speaking of the destruction of language, amazing, isn't it, how infantile and staggeringly easily offended PC makes people? Check out this item in James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today":

Washington state's Snohomish High School suspended senior Justin Patrick for wearing a T-shirt that said "SNOHOS," an abbreviation for "Snohomish" that appears on the schools own Web site (last item). The Seattle Times explains why:

School officials say "Snohos" contains a slang term for prostitutes and is derogatory toward women.

"As a woman, I am sure that you can appreciate our desire in Snohomish to maintain respect for all members of our community, especially our young women, and to not allow the abbreviated form of our school name to be used to reference them as 'ho's,' " said district spokeswoman Shannon Parthemer, in response to an e-mail query about the suspension.

Well, those are some pretty good points. Some will call Parthemer a hostage to political correctness, but we say she deserves hosannas for her efforts to make the Snohomish environment less hostile and more hospitable.

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words", Syme told Winston one day as the two were lunching in the Ministry of Information. No doubt, he would have approved of how language was manipulated to make Terri Schiavo's death sound surprisingly appealing.

The left, which invented the manipulation of language to further its goals, now believes that Republicans win elections not because of their ideas--but because of the language they use to frame them.

Michael Ubaldi calls it for what it is: projection.

National Review looks at Reuters--the "news agency" that will not call a terrorist a terrorist.

The Ombudsgod has some advice for the NPR ombudsman on euphemisms for murder and terrorism.

You can actually see the left turning back the calendar from 9/11 to 9/10 by reading the NPR ombudsman's linguistic decrees in September of 2001 and April of 2002. And be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page to read the Baghdad correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald's description of Saddam's hirsute appearance in the dock.

Andrew Sullivan notes that the "anti-Western left has come up with a new term for a terrorist".

I wonder if Reuters will start using this one.

Joanne Jacobs writes that in England, the PC clean-up crew is trying to get sign language changed because they feel it relies on outdated social stereotypes. But deaf Britons are resisting.

In some respects, written English has already been split into two languages--one that's traditional and one that's PC (for very simple examples, changing Christmas to holidays, mankind to humankind, etc.). It looks like sign language could be headed in the same Babel-like direction.

Joanne Jacobs writes, "Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police, got her hands on New York state's guidelines for textbooks. Anything that could offend anybody is out".

And how!

Or, as George Orwell wrote, some 56 years ago:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition [of 1984's Newspeak Dictionary], we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'

Anti-Semitic attacks in New York more than tripled since last year, according to the New York Post:

The statistics are chilling to even those who don't want to believe them: The number of anti-Semitic attacks in the city last month was more than triple that of a year ago - an ominous sign of "global anti-Semitism coming home," Jewish leaders warn.

The vast majority of the attacks occurred in Brooklyn and mostly on the fringes of Jewish neighborhoods like Borough Park.

Of course, as Andrew Sullivan writes, "Chomsky has to deny it. Or else he would have to answer for consorting with those who practice it."

UPDATE: Here's another Chomsky whopper.

ANOTHER UPDATE: New York magazine has more, on anti-Semitism worldwide. They refer to "the new p.c. anti-Semitism". Parse the words in that sentence for a few moments--it's now politically correct for the left to be reflexively against Jews. Roger L. Simon's right: it feels very much like 1938.

About Rush Limbaugh, Greg Easterbrook writes:

Limbaugh was wrong about the football. Was he wrong to be discussing race?

Limbaugh's background is political commentary, and in politics, race should be discussed frankly regardless of where it leads you. If some person or group is being unfairly harmed because of race, or some person or group unfairly benefiting because of race, this should be said: and the more forthright the language the better, since in the political sphere we need to talk about race in open, candid terms. Plus, political opinions receive what judges call "absolute" protection under the First Amendment. If, say, Limbaugh wanted to call Al Sharpton an idiot or a fraud or anything else related to Sharpton's politics, no one would argue with Limbaugh's right to such opinions. Note: Sharpton would make a lousy quarterback.

But sports is primarily a form of entertainment, so the equation there is different. The first goal of the NFL, and of ESPN, is to entertain. The league and the networks want people to have fun when they watch football or think about football. If fans aren't having fun--if Rush says things that make the audience squirm--this backfires on the league and on ESPN. Racial commentary may be necessary and even healthy in some aspects of life, but it is no one's idea of fun, and so antithetical to the first purpose of the NFL and of ESPN. Thus the sorts of comments that might be absolutely protected when the subject is politics might be verboten when the subject is entertainment.

As I said last week, Amon's law rules the land.

UPDATE: On the other hand, this isn't exactly the best defense of Limbaugh's comments!

There's a detailed mini-review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Language Police by Jonah Goldberg in NRO's "The Corner" Weblog.

Joanne Jacobs has a post that includes a link to a recent Suzanne Fields essay about "ethnic theme houses", a euphemism for segregated college dorms.

Diversity, for the Left, has long been an oxymoron in regards to thought. Today, it's easier than ever to receive a college education while only being around people who look--as well as think--exactly like you do.

Did you know it was an offensive word? Neither did I. But it's being banned by Washington State government. Protein Wisdom has the link, buried in their rather pithy take on the situation.