Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Newspeak of the week

I swear that if I hear another pundit yammer about how Bush displays "moral clarity" -- one of the most regurgitated of the GOP talking points these days, and certainly one of of its most strangely meaningless -- I'm going to unplug my TV. I'm not sure what I'll do if it keeps appearing in my newspaper. Especially from columnists I used to respect.

What's obvious is that it's the favored way of depicting Bush among those who have a deep need these days for "moral clarity." I'm not really sure what exactly is moral about threatening to invade another nation on pretexts as flimsy as those Bush has presented us with so far. But then, I've always been one of those oddballs who thought ethics were more important than morality anyway.

All this spinning and propagandizing, of course, is the smoke and fog that inevitably emanates from Newspeak. Here's at the heart of what we're being told:

Smug self-certainty is moral clarity.

Like all Newspeak, of course, it's important to remember that its function is to render the core concepts themselves meaningless. In this case, morality and clarity are both nullified.

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