Speaking With Forked Tongue - Part I

"They say the truth will set you free. But the truth does more. It indicts, it convicts, it rends and shreds excuses, denials and the simple ability to live at peace with the past. The truth is hard. That is why people often choose instead the soft comfort of lies." Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Words have the power to reveal the truth. But they have an equal power to hide or distort the truth. When people in power abuse words and the truth it’s called propaganda, and while it isn't as obvious a weapon as a sword or a gun, propaganda may well have killed more people.

Words are especially dangerous when they are stood on their head and corrupted to mean their opposite or used to promote an opposite cause. There’s a term for this: "false logic labeling" or as George Orwell succinctly put it in 1984 "doublespeak".

Who can be against Clear Skies?

The Bush administration was notorious for doublespeak. Even single-syllable words like "clear" and "clean" were distorted beyond all recognition. In the Bush administration, "clear" and "clean" came to mean clearing the way for campaign contributors and corporations to clean-up.

One of the more glaring and egregious examples of doublespeak was the Clear Skies Initiative (CSI) put forth early in the administration. While passing itself off as protecting the environment, in reality it was a coal-industry scheme to undercut the EPA and existing environmental standards.

The Supreme Court eventually ruled the EPA violated the Clean Air Act by failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Bush’s response was predictably devious and defiant – he issued an executive order that proposed even weaker regulation. That was in keeping with his habit of signing legislation into law and simultaneously issuing executive orders to countermand it.

Compassionate conservative coal-mining

The Clear Skies Initiative was part of the Bush administration’s "Clean Energy Policy", a policy that outrageously permitted coal companies to remove whole mountain-tops in West Virginia and Tennessee.

It’s hard to understand how anyone could call such devastation "clean" or even a "policy", unless the policy was simply to plunder the land with no regard for the future or for the misery of people left to deal with the problems the plunderers left behind.

What was left behind was poisoned water supplies, healthcare crises and ravaged landscapes. This is what compassionate conservative coal-mining looks like:

If this was environmental "protection", then the Bush administration used the word "protection" about the same way as the Mafia.

Speaking of criminals, the acronym for the Clear Skies Initiative, CSI, should have remained where it is more commonly used – Crime Scene Investigation, for surely this is the scene of a horrible crime, and the charges should include reckless disregard, robbery and rape.

Surely it can’t be conservative to engage in mountain-top mining … surely it can’t be conservative to create misery for others to obtain a few more personal luxuries … surely it can’t be conservative to ruin the future for the sake of present profit … surely it can’t be conservative to be against conservation.

Surely permitting or committing such devastation can’t be what it means to be a conservative. But if it is, then that word, too, will have to be redefined.

Déjà vu all over again

The Bush administration may have been the worst abuser of doublespeak, but it was hardly the first. The administration of Lyndon Johnson played fast and loose with the truth, too, with similar negative consequences. The parallels between the administrations are striking.

Both used deception and scare tactics, a nuclear attack and a mushroom cloud, to get elected and blunt criticism of their policies. Both hyped long-term external threats, communism and terrorism, to justify their own over-reaching policies. Both used blatant deceptions, the Gulf of Tonkin and WMD, as an excuse for a misbegotten and eventually unpopular war.

Both administrations had Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, who were martinets and micro-managed and mismanaged a war and deceived the public relentlessly about its execution and its progress. Both wars went unresolved and were passed onto successors.

Historians, as well as politicians, should not ignore one lesson to be drawn from this. Both administrations failed in part because they flagrantly abused words and the truth. Thus they were hoist with their own petard, because eventually no one believed anything they said – even when it was the truth.

The little boy who cried wolf is not just a fable.

Striking a blow for torture truth

The masters of deceit in the Bush administration are gone, but they are far from forgotten. Thanks to the tangled web of deceptions they left behind, the Obama administration has been left with a number of all but intractable problems.

One problem is what to do with the prisoners of war hostages victims enemy combatants captured in the New Crusades Project for a New American Century Oil Wars Operation Iraqi Freedom War on Terror, a problem made worse because some of these prisoners of war hostages victims enemy combatants were subjected to torture enhanced interrogation techniques.

Washington word-merchants have created a cottage industry to manufacture bullshit legal opinions, lies denials and excuses justifications for torture enhanced interrogation techniques. But it appears a substantial portion of the public is no longer buying their bullshit product.

Sadly, the Obama administration is resorting to some of the same abuse of words – if not of prisoners. But euphemisms are not likely to be much help untying the Gitmoian Knot.

The knotty problem of namesmanship

Nor is Obama administration likely to restore confidence in the financial industry by re-branding Toxic Assets as Legacy Assets – that’s the same sort of namesmanship that created the problem in the first place. And this time around, gun-shy investors are not going to be fooled by putting lipstick on a pig. 

Derivatives, the pig in a poke greedy investors bought before, were little more than unregulated casino bets labeled with fancy names like Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps. Frankly, calling them Toxic Assets is too kind. They should be called what they are – gambling debts.

But if Washington and Wall Street were honest, the public would surely be screaming "No!" to taking on trillions in gambling debts.

As I outlined in an earlier post The Twelve Labors of Obama, the President has a monumental task in front of him. He not only has a mountain of knotty problems left behind by his predecessor, he has an ambitious agenda of his own.

If Obama wants to maintain the kind of support that will be required to accomplish all this, he would be well-advised to keep his words clear and his nose clean.

©2009 Tom Cordle

(Thanks to the brilliant Sandra Miller Stephens for coining "tonguage".)