Truth is hard to find behind doublespeak

Monday, November 27, 2006

By CALVIN WOODWARD
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON -- The government's annual accounting of hunger in the U.S. reported no hunger in its last outing. Instead, it found "food insecurity."

Likewise, no one is even considering retreating from Iraq. "Redeploying" the heck out of there is, however, an option.

In Washington, words are a moving target that conceal at least as much as they reveal. Doublespeak runs through the discourse on Iraq, terrorism and domestic matters to a point at which it's hard to tell what is going on.

The libertarian Cato Institute recently took on the rising tide of fuzzy words in the fight against terrorism, arguing that whatever people think of what the government is doing, it would help to understand what the government is doing.

That is no easy task when the administration offers tortured definitions of torture, describes suicide by captives as "self-injurious behavior incidents" and labeled at least one suspect an "imperative security internee" when it became constitutionally questionable to hold him as an "enemy combatant."

Interrogations are debriefings. Propaganda is a struggle "for hearts and minds." The estate tax is the death tax. The right to an abortion is the right to "choose."

And can anyone oppose the Patriot Act and still be a patriot?

"By corrupting the language, the people who wield power are able to fool the others about their activities and evade responsibility and accountability," Cato's Timothy Lynch argues in his polemic against doublespeak -- an outgrowth of the doublethink and newspeak of George Orwell's "1984."

But nefarious "war is peace" Orwellianisms are not the only impulse at work, by a long shot.

Some of Washington's bland euphemisms are calculated mainly not to offend. Just as Dead End signs have been replaced in some communities by No Outlet ones, congressional oversight investigators tend these days to find "challenges" in the behavior of agencies, as they politely put it, and not quite so many "problems" -- how rude.

Republicans pitch elimination of the "death tax" because it sounds more populist than giving rich people a break by getting rid of the "estate tax."

Democrats will go to the wall in defense of abortion rights without uttering that unpleasant word, abortion. Instead, they are champions of "choice" or, in a less guarded moment, "reproductive choice." (The cause is advocated by progressives, formerly liberals.)