Thursday, November 1, 2007

Tortured Words

Bush Backs Attorney General Nominee
President Bush today demanded that Democratic lawmakers stop pressing his attorney general nominee for his views on a harsh CIA interrogation technique and called for a prompt Senate confirmation vote in the interests of battling terrorism.
- By William Branigin and Dan Eggen

Comments
PBosleySlogthrop wrote:
George Bush tells the nation that asking his nominee for the post of Attorney General whether waterboarding is torture or illegal is "unfair." It reminds me of George Orwell's great 1946 essay on "Politics and the English Language." The latter George wrote: "Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." Is there anything uglier that the games being played by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their apparatchiks, now including Judge Mukasey, with the word "torture"? And now what are we to make of the meaning of the word "unfair" when it is used as Mr. Bush uses it, to defend his nominee's inability to answer a simple question that everyone else in the world knows the answer to because the nominee "hasn't been briefed" on the "classified program"? Of course, it's Bush himself who determines who will or will not be briefed and what information will or will not be classified. Apparently Judge Mukasey can't be trusted with information about interrogation techniques before he is confirmed. "Unfair" indeed. It puts me in mind of another great quote in Alice in Wonderland (or Through a Looking Glass): "When I use a word, it means just what I want it to mean . . ." When Alice challenged that words have meanings independent of the speaker's intention, the response was something like "The question is who is to be master, that's all." "Torture" and "unfair" - they mean just what Bush and Cheney want them to mean, that's all. After all, as Bush reminded us, he's "the Decider"!
11/1/2007 8:33:43 PM

No comments: