<div>From the Whiskey Bar.  "Oh don't ask why..."</div> <div> </div> <div>Mike B)</div> <div> </div> <div> <A href="http://billmon.org/archives/002746.html" target=_blank>http://billmon.org/archives/002746.html</A> ____________________ A spokesman for the Senate Armed Services chairman says draft legislation is headed to Capitol Hill with "new language," for a proposal that would allow the CIA to continue alternative interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. -- CNN, Senate aide: White House changing its CIA interrogation bill, September 19, 2006 <<A href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/18/congress.tribunals/" target=_blank>http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/18/congress.tribunals/</A>> In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 <<A href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm" target=_blank>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm</A>> ____________________ Some of the changes in the Middle East are happening gradually, but they are real . . . Citizens have voted in municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, in parliamentary elections in Jordan and Bahrain, and in multiparty presidential elections in Yemen and Egypt . . . Every nation that travels the road to freedom moves at a different pace, and the democracies they build will reflect their own culture and traditions. George W. Bush, Speech to the UN General Assembly, September 19, 2006 <<A href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-4.html" target=_blank>http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-4.html</A>> It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 <<A href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm" target=_blank>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm</A>> ____________________ While civilized societies uphold justice, mercy, and the value of life, the terrorists hold to an ideology that feeds on the pain of others and glorifies murder and suicide. Though they plot and plan and operate by stealth, the terrorists make no secret of the beliefs they hold. They seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child would live in total obedience to a narrow and hateful ideology. -- Dick Cheney, Speech to the National Automobile Dealers Association, September 19, 2006 <<A href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-5.html" target=_blank>http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-5.html</A>> When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy . . . And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 <<A href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm" target=_blank>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm</A>> ____________________ PRESIDENT BUSH: It's been a pleasure to have a meaningful, strategic dialogue with Jacques Chirac. We talked about a lot of subjects . . . It was a very constructive and important dialogue. PRESIDENT CHIRAC: Well, indeed, today we have discussed and evidenced the fact that we have common approaches and a common sense of the main issues that we discussed . . . And we, as a result of this, have once again confirmed that we are entirely on the same wave length -- we have the same approach to the different issues, which are of deep and grave concern to us, as they challenge and jeopardize peace in different parts of the world. -- George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac, Press Conference, September 19, 2006 <<A href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-1.html" target=_blank>http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-1.html</A>> The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 <<A href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm" target=_blank>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm</A>> ____________________ Reasonable people can come to different conclusions about the extent of the rights that should be enjoyed by people believed to be among the most dangerous Islamofascist terrorists on the planet. -- Frank Gaffney, Washington Times op ed, September 19, 2006 <<A href="http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060918-095951-1756r.htm" target=_blank>http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060918-095951-1756r.htm</A>> The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 <<A href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm" target=_blank>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm</A>> ____________________ We Are Seeing A Bright Future Begin To Take Root In The Broader Middle East. White House Fact sheet, September 19, 2006 <<A href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-3.html" target=_blank>http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060919-3.html</A>> All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 <<A href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm" target=_blank>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm</A>> </div> Read "Penguins in Bondage": http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/ <hr size=1>Want to be your own boss? Learn how on <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=41244/*http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index"> Yahoo! Small Business.</a>