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.

Read the whole thing.

"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.

You can hear my interview with Julia in the latest edition of PJM Political--tune in here; she's about 15 minutes in, right after Bill Bradley's opening segment.

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.'

Over at VodkaPundit, a more high-tech Blog (though a fair amount of Victory Gin is available upon request, I hear), Will Collier notes that last Monday, "Thesaurus.com went down for a long stretch, and after it came back up, a remarkable number of words were gutted of synonym entries, and some were missing entries altogether."

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."

Read More »

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.

Coupled with Michelle Obama's punitive liberalism, Rev. Wright's radical chic-era boilerplate conspiratorial racism, Tony Rezko's questionable financial dealings, and Obama's own minimalistic voting record, that's quite a load of baggage for someone with a featherweight history as a national politician to tote on the road to the White House.

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.

Read the whole thing. The applications of the screeching inversion (and PBB's suggestions as to one of its popularizers in the 1960s is a pretty good one, in my opinion) are endless, but this endlessly screeched inversion is as good a recent example as any.

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."

As Kathy writes, "Yeah, it's only January, but seriously: do you think this can be topped"?

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.

Robbins has a fair amount of real-life experience acting insane, but the film's family man driven round the bend theme sounds like a remake of Michael Douglas' Falling Down. And ironically, with its Dolby Digital six-channel soundtrack, it will probably be one of the loudest movies in the multiplex.

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."

If history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, here's the San Francisco counterpoint to the above east coast incident, which Cinnamon Stillwell recently linked to:

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.

I worked in a retail store a couple of decades ago. Back then, the typical response to "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up", would have come from the store's manager and had the words "you're fired, schmuck" somewhere in the sentence.

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.

As for Hillary, Jonah writes:

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.

As Jonah writes, if Hillary wants to eschew being called liberal for "the well-rested progressive label", then "conservatives shouldn't get in the way, if for no other reason than some of us Adam Smith tie-wearing right-wingers are tired of hearing socialized medicine described as a liberal idea".

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."

Found via Glenn Reynolds, a Stanford undergraduate named Allysia Finley explains the consequences of "thinking different" on campus, to paraphrase the favorite advertising slogan of another Bay Area institution:

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.

Stunning? On the contrary, they were entirely predictible.

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!

Finley writes:

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.

They haven't tried to lynch her for preaching integration? Well, there's your 40 years of civil rights progress right there!

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.

Reuters in particularly would probably go for that. And retaining something close to the established initials and dates is basically what this academic initiative to increase society's fracturing is subtly designed to do.

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".

As Steyn writes, "I see the Times' previously lucrative franchise looks like being disenfranchised a lot quicker than Britain's 'South Asian population' will be."

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.

As they say in Eurasia (or is it Eastasia?), read the whole thing.

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.

As can "Some say", another dreaded expression of Journalese, according to analysts.

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.

A year later, Ace of Spades notes that those same basic liberal media rules also apply when they report on their collective arch-nemesis--conservative blogs.

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".

With the exception of those who used the word prior to 2001 (Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard all immediately come to mind), I'd say that's a perfectly viable rule.

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.

#2 has been proven time and time and time again; Glenn Reynolds believes #3 best explains the Republican crack-up over immigration. On the other hand, Jim Geraghty writes:

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

Harriet Miers.

And finally, your George Orwell meets Malcolm Muggeridge moment of the day: a reporter at a press conference on the immigration compromise yesterday actually asked about "law-abiding illegal workers".

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?

"Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie, if you believe it".

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.

In the Bay Area, I remember hearing the phrase "fur children" to describe pets as far back as 2000--or maybe even the late 1990s. And it's not at all a coincidence that while the number of "fur children" in the area may be rising, in 2005, AP wrote that "San Francisco has the smallest share of [human] small-fry of any major U.S. city", adding, "Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under." In linking to this column, James Taranto wrote:

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.

Or as Mark Steyn put it back then in regards the bluest state of them all--the EU:

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?

To coin a phrase, it's the demography, stupid.

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.

And as James Taranto noted last Friday:

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.

This infantilizing trend has been going on, probably since 9/11, but it really gained steam when the media created the Cindy Sheehan phenomonon and her "Absolute Moral Authority". I wrote about it in 2005, focusing on the Hollywood left, not surprisingly:

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?

Regarding Barbara Boxer's related slur against Condi Rice last week, Mickey Kaus wrote:

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.

As Allahpundit writes in response:

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” sounds like something Marx or Nietzsche would have written (Nietzsche had his "Will To Power", after all) in the 19th century, but it's actually much more recent; it dates back to a 1955 Quaker pamphlet concerning the Cold War written by Milton Mayer. As Quaker historian H. Larry Ingle wrote here:

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.

This document sheds further light on its 20th century development (scroll to the bottom of page 14):

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.

Senator Kerry frequently claims that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” was an aphorism written by Thomas Jefferson, instead of its actual origin as sophistry coined in the mid-1960s by an anti-World War II pacifist. Likewise, it’s fascinating to watch this simple phrase become a cliché that’s spread astoundingly far from its original--and apparently little-known--origin.

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.

As opposed to its current state.

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.

Betsy adds, "I think the American people would be happy for the UN to leave, but few politicians would seriously support such a position. And that's a shame."

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.

Read the whole thing--and then read Ace of Spades' very much related thoughts.

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.

Or as Pamela asks, "Devastation? What Devastation?" Charles Johnson writes, "The way the bombing of Beirut is being reported is highly reminiscent of the infamously exaggerated Jenin hoax".

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 only member of President Bush's first term who garned anything approaching what might loosely be called "respect" from the left was Colin Powell. But ironically, the central tennent of the so-called "Powell Doctrine" (it was actually originally shaped by Caspar Weinberger, but why quibble?) is this:

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.

Which is the only way to ensure victory. But of course, who in the Middle East, the UN or Europe wants Israel to actually achieve victory?

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