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It might seem like splitting hairs, but Christopher Hitchens is not happy with the media’s “dissident” designation applied to terrorists.
… The term describes only attitudes and not actions, and it is most famously associated with the intellectual opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. (Prior to that usage, it was principally applied to those religious people of conscience who refused allegiance to the established Catholic and Episcopalian churches, which ironically would perhaps qualify the word dissident as being “overwhelmingly Protestant.”)
Plainly, something has been lost when such a historic term of honor and respect is loosely applied to homicidal thugs who shoot a Catholic policeman in the head and use pizza delivery workers as human shields. But in a media world where Bin Laden’s murderous surrogates in Iraq can be given a homely moniker, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. As a novel about the Nazi era has recently reminded us, the Furies of antiquity were so much dreaded that they were sometimes apotropaically named “the Kindly Ones,” or Eumenides. If you want a quick definition of euphemism, this would do: It consists of inventing nice terms for nasty things (perhaps to make them seem less nasty) and soft words for frightening things (perhaps to make them seem less scary). We should have learned by now that this form of dishonesty is also a form of cowardice, by which some of the enemy’s work is done for him. We have seen through propaganda terms like collateral damage and ethnic cleansing. Let us not put up with homegrown for something vile and alien, or the abuse of the moral term dissident for something that is both cruel and coercive.
Christopher Booker in the Telegraph, UK reports on the climate conference you won’t hear about.
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world’s politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker. …
Bill Kristol has advice for the GOP. Don’t allow a Dem administration to go to waste.
“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” chief-of-staff-designate Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times the Sunday after Barack Obama’s election. “They are opportunities to do big things.”
Emanuel deserves points for candor. But perhaps not for perspicacity. His assumption was that the economic crisis was and would remain Bush’s crisis and that the opportunities were and would remain Obama’s opportunities. But what if the crisis becomes Obama’s crisis? Then the opportunities can be Republican opportunities.
The first two months of the Age of Obama haven’t turned out quite the way Emanuel and Obama’s legions hoped and expected. The early momentum is flagging. …
Thomas Sowell comments on the GOP civil war.
As if it is not enough that they have been decimated by the Democrats in the past couple of elections, the Republican survivors are now turning their guns on each other.
At the heart of these internal battles have been attacks on Rush Limbaugh by Republicans who imagine themselves to be so much more sophisticated because they are so much more in step with the political fashions of the time.
New Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele’s cheap shot at Rush’s program as “ugly” set off the latest round of in-fighting. That is the kind of thing that is usually said by liberals who have never listened to the program.
Regular listeners to the Rush Limbaugh program or subscribers to the Limbaugh newsletter know that both contain far more factual information and in-depth analysis than in the programs or writings of pundits with more of a ponderous tone or intellectual airs.
Why Michael Steele found it necessary to say such a thing— except as a sop to the liberal intelligentsia— is one of the many mysteries of the Republican Party. Steele has since apologized to Rush but you cannot unring the bell. …
Debra Saunders says it is amazing to hear Obama talking up the economy.
How the tables have turned. In September 2008, when GOP presidential nominee John McCain said “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” unemployment was 6.1 percent, the credit crunch had yet to reach the point that prompted President George W. Bush to propose a bailout, and Team Obama proclaimed that an out-of-touch McCain “just doesn’t get it” on the economy.
Now with unemployment at 8.1 percent, the $700 billion-plus Bush bailout has been followed by the $787 billion Obama stimulus package, and some D.C. Democrats already are arguing for another stimulus package because the first Obama stimulus bill didn’t do the trick. Yet top Obama economic adviser Christina Romer told “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “Of course, the fundamentals (of the U.S.) economy are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology.” (Those qualifying statements sound a lot like the McCain explanation for his positive diagnosis of the economy – “that the workers of America are the fundamentals of the economy.”)
President Obama himself said last week, “If we are keeping focused on all the fundamentally sound aspects of our economy … then we’re going to get through this.”
If Obama is confident about the soundness of the U.S. economy, does that mean he “just doesn’t get it?” …
Interesting Corner post on the quality of the armies in our Revolutionary War.
Scrappleface says Dodd and Obama are outraged over the cash AIG gave their campaigns last year.
… President Obama and Sen. Dodd were the two largest recipients of campaign contributions from the beleaguered company, and the only politicians to garner six-figure amounts from AIG in 2008 — $103,100 for Sen. Dodd and $100,332 for presidential candidate Obama. …
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