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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Sully- who wrote (70930)4/7/2009 11:24:17 PM
From: Sully-1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 90947
 
Obama's word play

The administration has created a lexicon that masks reality through the gauzy world of euphemism. To the world, it’s just words.

By Jonah Goldberg
USA TODAY Opinion

President Obama had a grand time in Europe. He wowed the press, met the queen, gave some wonderful news conferences and got virtually none of the major policy concessions he wanted. But he did do a lot of talking, for what that's worth.

And for Obama, that's worth a lot. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought words meant a great deal
. "Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama proclaimed. " 'I have a dream' — just words? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' — just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' — just words? Just speeches?"

Give the man points for consistency. He has put rhetorical innovation on an equal footing with policy innovation. Exhibit A: "Overseas contingency operations."
That's the Obama administration's term of choice to replace "the long war" or "the global war on terror." No doubt they were inspired by the famous Leo Tolstoy novel, Overseas Contingency Operations and Cessation of Overseas Contingency Operations, later dumbed-down by the publisher to War and Peace.

Janet Napolitano, head of Obama's Department of Homeland Security — primarily created to deal with terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11 — has decided "terrorist attack" is too hard-edged. It's "man-caused disasters" now. "That is perhaps only a nuance," Napolitano explained to a German newsmagazine, "but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur."

Meanwhile, the White House has announced that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will no longer be called "enemy combatants." No word yet on what the new term will be. No doubt the poetic euphony of "man-caused disasters" and "overseas contingency operations" sets a very high bar for Obama's Office of Euphemism Generation. But surely "Men Prone to Disaster Causation" or "Overseas Counter-Contingency Operators" are the most obvious choices. My friend Mark Steyn, however, suggests going another way: "Future Facebook Friends."


'Morally tone-deaf'

And that points to just one of the problems with the Obama administration's effort to use words to shape reality.
It's morally tone-deaf. Maybe Napolitano is right about the need to bleed fear from our politics (a directive Obama didn't seem to have in mind when he suggested that failure to pass his budget would lead to catastrophe, er, man-caused disaster). But these phrases are morally meaningless. Public safety is an important government function, but, regardless of whether "war on terror" was the right term, it's surely wrong to use language better suited for a salmonella outbreak to describe a conflict with evil men who have American blood on their hands.

We've seen this before.
Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of State, famously declared that countries such as North Korea would no longer be called "rogue nations" but instead "states of concern," which sounded an awful lot like various poses from a photo shoot with Dr. Phil. One can hope that the problems that came with the Clinton administration's lawyerly approach to terrorism won't be replayed by this administration. President Clinton was very good at vowing to hunt down our enemies after terrorist attacks, but when he left the podium, he was more interested in how his comments played in polls and focus groups than what we were doing to catch the bad guys.

So far it's hard to say definitively how Clintonite Obama's approach really is. His approach toward Iraq and Afghanistan is better than his critics on the right expected and worse than his fans on the left hoped. Indeed, despite the change in jargon, in the war formerly known as "the war on terror," Obama's policies are shockingly in sync with Bush's.

However his policies turn out, it's clear that Obama still puts a great amount of stock in the power of words — his words. In particular he continues to have a candidate's relish for denigrating George W. Bush and a left-wing academic fondness for finding fault with America. In Europe last week, he pledged more "humility" and apologized for America's "arrogance."

Symbolism over substance

Similarly, as befits a very symbolic president, his administration enjoys symbolic gestures. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked on the Russians before the Group of 20 summit by giving them a giant red button with the word "reset" on it (or that was the plan; they used the wrong word in Russian). In a meeting with the Russian president, Obama followed up by lamenting the "drift" in Russian-American relations. Putting aside the oddness of giving a big red button to an antagonistic country with a boatload of nuclear weapons, it's still an odd tack to take with the Russians. After all, whatever mistakes the Bush administration may have made, Russia was hardly the aggrieved party. America didn't make Russia invade Georgia, aid Iran or crush democracy. President Bush famously, and naively, saw Vladimir Putin's soul in the Russian leader's eyes. Obama's naiveté may rest in his own belief that his words amount to some kind of Jedi mind trick.

Indeed, Obama spent the week telling Europeans everything they wanted to hear, but got little for it. The French and the Germans still belittled America's "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism and refused to follow our lead.

This might lead to a painful realization for Obama. While he may think words are everything, for our enemies and even our friends, words are — still — just words.

Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

blogs.usatoday.com



To: Sully- who wrote (70930)4/9/2009 12:34:15 AM
From: Sully-2 Recommendations  Respond to of 90947
 
Let's All Surrender Our Weapons -- You First!

by Ann Coulter
HUMAN EVENTS
Posted 04/08/2009 ET
Updated 04/08/2009 ET

The rash of recent shooting incidents has led people who wouldn't know an AK-47 from a paintball gun to issue demands for more restrictions on guns. To be sure, it's hard to find any factor in these shootings that could be responsible -- other than the gun.

So far, this year's public multiple shootings were committed by:

-- Richard Poplawski, 23, product of a broken family, expelled from high school and dishonorably discharged from the Marines, who killed three policemen in Pittsburgh.

-- Former crack addict Jiverly Wong, 41, who told co-workers "America sucks" yet somehow was not offered a job as a speechwriter for Barack Obama, who blockaded his victims in a civic center in Binghamton, N.Y., and shot as many people as he could, before killing himself.

-- Robert Stewart, 45, a three-time divorcee and high school dropout with "violent tendencies" -- according to one of his ex-wives -- who shot up the nursing home in Carthage, N.C., where his newly estranged wife worked.

-- Lovelle Mixon, 26, a paroled felon, struggling to get his life back on track by pimping, who shot four cops in Oakland, Calif. -- before eventually being shot himself.

-- Twenty-eight-year-old Michael McLendon, child of divorce, living with his mother and boycotting family funerals because he hated his relatives, who killed 10 of those relatives and their neighbors in Samson, Ala.


It might make more sense to outlaw men than guns. Or divorce. Or crack. Or to prohibit felons from having guns. Except we already outlaw crack and felons owning guns and yet still, somehow, Wong got crack and Mixon got a gun.

After being pulled over for a routine traffic violation, Lovelle Mixon did exactly what they teach in driver's ed by immediately shooting four cops. Mixon's supporters held a posthumous rally in his honor, claiming he shot the cops only in "self-defense," which I take it includes the cop Mixon shot while the officer was lying on the ground.

I guess Mixon also raped that 12-year-old girl in "self-defense." Clearly, the pimping industry has lost a good man. I wish I'd known him. I tip my green velvet fedora with the dollar signs all over it to him. Why do the good ones always die young? Pimps, I mean.

Liberals tolerate rallies on behalf of cop-killers, but they prohibit law-abiding citizens working at community centers in Binghamton, N.Y., from being armed to defend themselves from disturbed, crack-addicted America-haters like Jiverly Wong.

It's something in liberals' DNA: They think they can pass a law eliminating guns and nuclear weapons, but teenagers having sex is completely beyond our control.

The demand for more gun control in response to any crime involving a gun is exactly like Obama's response to North Korea's openly belligerent act of launching a long-range missile this week: Obama leapt to action by calling for worldwide nuclear disarmament.

If the SAT test were used to determine how stupid a liberal is, one question would be: "The best defense against lawless rogues who possess _______ is for law-abiding individuals to surrender their own _______________."

Correct answer: Guns. We would also have accepted nuclear weapons.

Obama explained that "the United States has a moral responsibility" to lead disarmament efforts because America is "the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon."

So don't go feeling all morally superior to a country whose business model consists of exporting heroin, nuclear bombs and counterfeit U.S. dollars, and of importing Swedish prostitutes, you yahoo Americans with your little flag lapel pins.

On the other hand, the Japanese haven't acted up much in the last, say, 64 years ...

Fortunately, our sailors didn't wait around for Obama to save them when Somali pirates boarded their ship this week. Stop right now or I'll ask the U.N. to remind the "international community" that "the U.S. is not at war with Somali pirates."

Gun-toting Americans are clearly more self-sufficient than the sissy Europeans. This is great news for everyone except Barney Frank, who's always secretly wondered what it would be like to be taken by a Somali pirate.

Police -- whom I gather liberals intend to continue having guns -- and intrepid U.N. resolution drafters can't be everywhere, all the time.

If a single civilian in that Binghamton community center had been armed, instead of 14 dead, there might have only been one or two -- including the shooter. In the end, the cops didn't stop Wong. His killing spree ended only when he decided to stop, and he killed himself.

"The shooter will eventually run out of ammo" strategy may not be the best one for stopping deranged multiple murderers.

But it's highly unlikely that any community center in the entire state would be safe from a disturbed former crack-addict like Wong because New York's restrictive gun laws require a citizen to prove he has a need for a gun to obtain a concealed carry permit.

Instead of having Planned Parenthood distribute condoms in schools, they ought get the NRA to pass out revolvers. It would save more lives.

Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" and most recently, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and their Assault on America.

humanevents.com