On welfare queens and five-legged dogs

[hvn_nbr_2]

Lincoln famously (and maybe apocryphally*) said, "How many legs would a dog have if we called the tail a leg. Four. Calling a dog's tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

I would add this: How many legs would a dog have if we called the hind legs dorsal fins? Four. Calling them something other than legs doesn't make them not legs.

Calling poor people "welfare queens" when they're trying to house, feed, and clothe a family on less per month than a Republican Senator spends on one trip to a diaper fetish hooker doesn't make them welfare queens.

Calling corporate welfare queens by some alternative euphemism does not make them not corporate welfare queens. Calling dishonest sleazebags "capitalists" or "corporate titans" does not make them anything other than sleazebags.

Calling peanuts for the poor "the dole" and a "culture of dependency" and calling hundreds of billions for corporate greed junkies "capitalism" does not make either of them so.

Calling it "capitalism" when gigantic companies pay out tens of billions of dollars in bonuses to the incompetent and dishonest sleazebags who drove the companies to the brink of bankruptcy and then asking for hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers to bail out their stupidity and pillaging does not make it capitalism. Using the taxpayers' money for fatcat boondoggles to luxury resorts, for corporate jets, and for acquisitions that change them from too-big-to-fail to too-bigger-to-fail does not make it capitalism either.

Calling torture "enhanced interrogation techniques" does not make it not torture.

Calling tax cuts a "stimulus" when all the economic evidence shows that they are not stimulative does not make them a stimulus.

Calling hate "loving the sinner" does not make it love. Love that is indistinguishable from hate is not love at all.

Calling unfair and unbalanced lying "fair and balanced" does not make it fair and balanced.

Calling a pack of lies a "slam dunk" does not make it anything other than a pack of lies.

Calling a war for the benefit of war profiteers a war of self-defense does not make it self-defense.

Calling the party of fiscal profligacy "the party of fiscal responsibility" does not make it so.

Calling lockstep obstructionism "bi-partisanship" does not make it bi-partisanship.



* For doubters and history double-checkers, here is a site that sources a firsthand account of Lincoln saying something similar: http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/lincoln-quote-sourced-calfs-tail-not-dogs-tail/

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

1. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

[DBoon]

2. As Orwell said 60 years ago..

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. 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. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

from Politics and the English Language

[angrycarpenter]

3. newspeak

Orwell was familiar with the concept, so was G. Carlin who said that the more syllables you add to the name of an ugly thing the less ugly it sounds.

[two gun sid]

4. Recommended.

[sam sarrha]

5. ReThugs are terrible about redefining words... if they let one little tiny truth in they turn back

into rancid pig shit. so thet must lie and spin everything out of their mouths