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Politics : The Solyndra Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (168)	10/15/2011 7:27:25 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1400

Twisting Words To Political Ends Posted 10/14/2011 06:46 PM ET Politics: When your jobs policy fails to bring jobs, how do you fudge your call for more of the same? If you're the White House, you start stretching the boundaries of the English language. When it became clear to President Obama and his economic and political advisers that spending more than a trillion dollars would not create many jobs, they decided that the problem wasn't their policies; it was the word "create." And so we endlessly heard promises of all of the millions of jobs their massive stimulus and government takeover of health insurance would "save or create." But with unemployment at 9.1% — not the under 8% they boldly predicted — and 14 million Americans jobless less than 13 months before Election Day 2012, "save or create" has worn kind of thin. So the latest Orwellian Newspeak the White House is offering as a substitute for "save and create" is a promise about how many jobs the new Obama stimulus plan will "support." As blogger Ed Morrissey quips on HotAir.com, this new term contains "even less meaning than their previous measure." Less meaning equals less accountability. According to the administration, "The American Jobs Act Will Support Nearly 400,000 Education Jobs." But Hoover Institution research fellow Charles Blahous, writing for the policy website e21, shows that what will likely be "supported" — and saved from the state and local budget balancer's knife — are wasteful and expensive state and local bureaucracies. Blahous warns that "the presence or absence of external funding for a particular spending priority will have enormous spillover effects upon the tough decisions states and localities must otherwise make to operate within existing budget constraints." In other words, if you keep giving them the money, they'll keep wasting it. This mysterious pledge to "support" hundreds of thousands of jobs in the corrupt, unionized public education leviathan comes on top of the other infamous word games the White House has played over two and a half years. Early on, for instance, the Obama Office of Management and Budget absurdly rechristened the global war on terror as a series of ongoing "Overseas Contingency Operations." Search the more than 4,100 words of the president's speech to Congress last month calling for a new $447 billion stimulus and you won't find "stimulus" mentioned once. That's because the word has become as poisoned as "detente" was after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Democrats dropped the word "stimulus" almost as fast as they did the word "Reaganomics" — that is, once Reaganomics succeeded. The official new term to replace stimulus is "jobs bill," following a long tradition of naming big government initiatives for results they don't produce, like the Great Society programs that devastated society by expanding America's underclass with Washington handouts. Obama, of course, can't claim a copyright on his habitual description of government spending as "investment" — an ironic choice of term, since his policies have prevented investment within the private sector. Bill Clinton is responsible for that slick wordplay. Forcing Americans to buy health insurance and imposing a stiff fine on those who won't comply, as the Obama-Care reform does, isn't an "individual mandate" in preferred Obamaspeak parlance; the provision is now instead an "individual responsibility requirement." George Orwell's novel "1984" demonstrated the direct connection between the misuse of language and keeping a people in tyranny. Not long before writing that masterpiece, in an essay on "Politics and the English Language," he warned that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." This administration's intentional misuse of words shouldn't hoodwink anyone into forgetting its reckless big government designs and its dismal policy failures. No amount of phony verbiage can make those disappear.