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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: Neeka who wrote (147379)11/17/2005 2:03:25 PM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (1) of 793888
 
I think your definition is a bit lacking in thoroughness.

There are multiple interpretations of the meaning of WMD. That's my point. I was trying to explain the ORDINARY meaning of it as opposed to the TERM OF ART coined by the administration for the WOT context. There is also Karen's definition and perhaps yours, which I infer is any weapon used by the current batch of dirty evil doers against the good guys.

This colloquy came out of the discussion about the "Bush lied" phenomenon where I asserted that I could see how some people might come to that conclusion.

If ordinary people paying only casual attention to the news on their way to a business meeting or driving the kids to a soccer game apply the ordinary meaning when they hear Bush saying that Saddam has WMD, what registers is that Saddam is going to drop nukes on us, not that Saddam might sell a packet of anthrax to some terrorist who might mail it to some dignitaries and make them sick and maybe kill a few of them because the latter is not remotely "mass" in impact. So when it turns out that Saddam doesn't have the capability to blow up our cities with nukes, they not unreasonably infer that Bush misled us for surely Bush knew that Saddam couldn't deliver nuclear bombs half way across the world.

That was my purpose in bringing up the definition problem. Communication problems caused by a lack of common definition result in distrust. Duh. You don't need to adapt my ordinary definition. You can use the administration's or Karen's or whatever you like. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of these people telling posters that Bush lied heard something different from what you heard. They heard genuinely misleading statements.
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