“Assume you are a senior political aide in the Obama White House,” Peter Wehner writes at Commentary, wishing a truly ignominious fate upon his readers. Fortunately, such a horrible career choice will only last as long as his blog post:

This morning, while eating a bowl of Cheerios, you read the front page of the Washington Post, where you found an above-the-fold story by Joel Achenbach. The story, titled “Is debt downgrade an alarm bell for a great nation in decline?” quotes Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served Jimmy Carter, who was jettisoned from office after his first term in large part because of the sense his policies were ushering in a period of American decline.

According to Brzezinski, “We have been for decades now the number one global economic power. But an increasing question mark is whether we are going to remain one.”

As Wehner adds, “when journalists take to the front page of the Washington Post to analyze whether or not we are seeing ‘the American empire in twilight,’ you can bet things are–politically speaking–very bad and about to get even worse.”

But hey, is that really such a bad thing to imagine if you’re a senior political aide to President Obama? Because if you put down the Washington Post (in the sense of putting the paper back onto your desk, as opposed to the way the Blogosphere puts down the Washington Post), you can then pick up a copy of Foreign Policy which is busy singing the praises of American decline.  Heck, Charles Kenny shouts “Three Cheers for Decline,” complete with a photo of the American flag in twilight, asking us to “Look on the bright side, America: Downgrading your global ambitions could make you a healthier and happier nation:”

Defense cuts would allow the United States to tend to a few other priorities, which just might take Americans’ minds off the fact that their country is no longer No. 1. Perhaps the United States could focus on constructing a high-speed rail line or two, or maybe even finish the job on extending health care. After all, of the large economies that enjoyed a AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s last week, the United States ranked at the bottom of the list in terms of life expectancy, and it was the only country without universal health care. Perhaps America could also spend a little more on basic education; the United States was at the tail end of the AAA club when it came to believing basic scientific truths like evolution, and it scored lowest out of all those countries on international tests of students’ math skills.

The end of Britain’s imperial ambitions allowed the country to abandon national service and just relax a little. Similarly, with less need to flag the martial spirit through adrenaline-pumping threat alerts and wars on terror, the United States could find a moment to reform its criminal justice system; another international indicator where the United States remains in the lead, after all, is in percentage of its population behind bars. And once America accepts it doesn’t need to work every waking hour to keep up with the Soviets, Japanese, or Chinese, perhaps it could take time for a vacation. At the moment, there is no statutory minimum for paid leave in the United States. Even Singapore provides seven days, and the rest of the AAA club gives employees minimums ranging from 18 to 30 days.

As to foreign relations, the United States couldn’t — and wouldn’t — follow Britain’s example and join the European Union, but here too, there could be scope for baby steps. What about signing up for the International Criminal Court or taking a less obstructive line during climate negotiations? In fact, a decline from hyperpower status will doubtless help prolong the upward trend in international opinion of the United States. It’s even possible that the U.S. government could get more done in the world by playing nice than barging around on its own.

Whatever happens to the United States in the global economic rankings, it will remain a great country. Accepting — even embracing — decline will serve as a reminder that American exceptionalism is built on a set of values, not stock indices. If the S&P downgrade helps the United States foster a shift toward prioritizing the good life over great-power status, perhaps it will be seen as a blessing in disguise. What’s more, the United States starts out its decline with many advantages over 1950s Britain. Not least, in large parts of the country, it is already possible to find a good restaurant — something that took the Brits 30-plus years of not-so-bad power status to achieve.

Yes, including Pho restaurants owned by former South Vietnamese boat people who fled when a Democratic Congress pulled the rug out from under our defense of South Vietnam, Afghani restaurants owned by people who fled because we’ve failed to pacify the Taliban, Chinese restaurants owned by people who would rather live here than in Thomas Friedman’s Beijing Jetsons wonderland for some strange reason, etc.

But I digress.

How is President Obama coping with this sort of cognitive dissonance? As we’ve seen, not very well, which is why the third year in Obama’s first term feels like the exhausted last year of a two term-president, where everybody, from the staff to the voters to likely the president himself can’t wait to go home and bring in the new guy.

Which is why, Mickey Kaus writes, “We’ve reached the stage in Obama’s presidency when he can’t seem to do anything right:”

 Even his summer house is on fire.  At a similar point in Jimmy Carter’s presidency Carter collapsed in a road race.  (I urge Obama to refrain from strenuous athletics until his approval rating gets back above 44%.) Everyone’s piling on–from the left as well as the right and the center. It’s almost enough to make my inner contrarian demand that I defend the guy. Almost, but not quite.

Here’s the thing: When other presidents have reached this point–at least other Democratic presidents, Carter and  Bill Clinton–they have recognized the problem and tried to get fresh advice. Carter had a series of excessively well-publicized meetings with critics. Clinton met secretly and more effectively with non-liberal strategist Dick Morris. And Obama?

The president is in a situation in which virtually none of his considered beliefs–in Keynesian economics, in the power of redistributive populism, in coalition politics, in  his own oratorical skill–is being affirmed by the real world. It’s like the period Thomas Kuhn talks about in his famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when scientists are working along within the old “paradigm” but the data start coming back funny. Most scientists just ignore the discordant data and keep plodding along. A few start to question the “paradigm.” You’d want a President in tough times to be one of the latter, no? You’d expect someone like Obama to undertake some reevaluation.  As Bret Stephens noted recently, genuinely smart people know what they don’t know–or in this case they know what they used to know but now aren’t so sure about anymore.

Barack Obama was quoted on the campaign stump by one of his biographers as saying, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls***.” The problem is that there’s so much bulls*** for Obama the Fightin’ Progressive to believe, and it’s mutually contradictory.

Construction unions exist to build things, but environmentalists exist to stop them, in addition to calling for the destruction of previously built projects such as hydroelectric dams. Obama calls for lower energy prices, but as a candidate promised a major US newspaper that he’d bankrupt the coal industry, and a major TV network that he was perfectly cool about higher gas prices, as long as their adjustment is “gradual” enough. He tells Americans not to drive SUVs as a candidate, but as president requires American taxpayers to absorb the bottomless debt of two of the America’s three purveyors of SUVs. Politicians on both sides of the aisle love to funnel defense department projects to companies like Boeing, but Obama was beholden to his largely anti-war base, which he doesn’t mind flipping the bird to, because hey, where are they going to go? Obama promises over and over again to focus like a laser on jobs, but businesses are terrified to hire and expand because of the regulatory uncertainty that defines his administration.

Note this passage in the Washington Post article that Peter Wehner linked to at Commentary:

The downgrading of U.S. debt may be more symbolic than empirically significant, but it gives one small data point to those who argue that America isn’t what it used to be, that it is an empire in twilight.

It was 70 years ago that Time magazine founder Henry Luce introduced the concept of “The American Century.” The term was ideologically loaded and did not wear well with those who feared, rather than celebrated, American hegemony. The naming rights to the new century seem to be up for grabs. Today, there are a slew of books that ponder a “post-American” epoch.

And Obama’s been photographed carrying one, written by a journalist and CNN talking head who eagerly puffs himself out and calls himself an advisor to the president (speaking of doublethink).

And speaking of twilight, perhaps this passage from the postwar left’s user’s manual sums up the complexities and contradictions of doublethink:

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’

Juggling all of that cognitive dissonance inside your cranium can really wear a man out — no wonder Obama needs to hit the links and Martha’s Vineyard so frequently.

Of course, if you consider your own rhetoric to be “bull***,” don’t be surprised if the rest of us think of it that way, too:

Related: Victor Davis Hanson at the Hoover Institute on Obama vs. Obama. “Barack Obama is now at war with Barack Obama. It is not just that the public has fathomed that what Obama says one day will change the next. It is more troublesome than that: Americans are catching on that what Obama now insists is true usually proves at odds with what Obama once asserted. So the nation is insidiously tuning him out—a novel and annoying experience for the president, who heretofore had received little criticism over his habitual inconsistencies and had assumed his formidable powers of rhetoric and his own landmark heritage would trump any scrutiny from nit-picky critics.”

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Steve Hayward of Power Line proffers “a suggestion for the Tea Party and their sympathizers: Since Reuters and other establishment media types embrace the moral relativism of the ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ nonsense, why not hoist them with their own petard, and start referring to ‘Tea Party freedom fighters?’ It will enable Krugman and Down to phone in yet another column.”

Heh.™

Related: Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary on “From Tea to Terror: The Roots of Demonization.”

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“National Journal’s Hirsh: Time for a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word,” Jeff Poor wrote at the Daily Caller on January 21st:

National Journal’s Michael Hirsh wants to raise the bar on decorum to an entirely new level. On Thursday’s MSNBC airing of “Hardball,” Hirsh told host Chris Matthews certain “gun” terms should be stricken from political discourse and referred to instances where Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Republican Nevada senatorial candidate Sharon Angle used such off-limits language.

“Well we don’t want any more duels and thankfully that was the last one,” Hirsh said. “[B]ut the point I was trying to make is you can draw a line particularly in the use of certain kinds of metaphors. The use of gun metaphors – killing, murdering, taking out, which was another metaphor for a – Michele Bachmann used in one of her statements, Sharon Angle – the Nevada Senate candidate’s now infamous comment about quote, unquote, ‘second amendment remedies’ to deal with the problem Harry Reid, her opponent.”

His proposal? Make such language inappropriate in the same racial slurs are inappropriate.

That’s the kind of language I think we got to have a hard think about now,” Hirsh said. “Do we really want to continue to use that kind of language at these levels? Or, should there be kind of a social sanction, not a legal one, but a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word public forums. Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”

The BlogProf today: “NYT’s Frank Rich: ‘If You Put A Reloaded Gun’ Up To Palin Would She Know About Bill Ayers?‘”

Of course she would — to borrow from another famous Stalinist, her source was the New York Times.

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That was then…

Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reports (second item). “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,” Jukes writes in an internal memo. “To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”

This is now: “Reuters Labels Norway Terror Suspect as ‘Right-Wing’ 25 Times.”

More from Glenn Reynolds and Ben Shapiro, guest-blogging at Ricochet, who explores “The Oslo Monster and the Rules of Violent Ideology.”

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Mark Steyn on how political correctness run amok leads to criminalizing comedy:

I read The Joke, Milan Kundera’s first novel, when I was a schoolboy. Bit above my level, but, even as a teenager, I liked the premise. Ludvik is a young man in post-war, newly Communist Czechoslovakia. He’s a smart, witty guy, a loyal Party member with a great future ahead of him. His girlfriend, though, is a bit serious. So when she writes to him from her two-week Party training course enthusing about the early-morning calisthenics and the “healthy atmosphere,” he scribbles off a droll postcard:

Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.

A few weeks later, he’s called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he’s sent to work in the mines. As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion. It was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia.” In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of “expert witnesses,” the “tone” of my jokes.

* * *

Who would have thought all the old absurdist gags of Eastern Europe circa 1948 would transplant themselves to the heart of the West so effortlessly? Indeed, a latter-day Kundera would surely reject as far too obvious a scenario in which lesbians and feminists lean on eunuch males to destroy a man for disrespecting the vascularized vagina by suggesting that semen might have restorative properties. “Give it to me straight, doc. I can take it”? Not anymore. Kundera’s Joke is now on us.

George Orwell certainly had no problem transposing the digits of the year 1948 to see how the socialism of the then-current Soviet Union and its incumbent show trials could eventually spread westward in about half a century. I never thought of Orwell as going in much for gut-busting humor, but I doubt he’d be surprised by the current state of comedy as thoughtcrime.

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“Metaphor Abuse” is one of those things that make blogger Dr. Weevil go “hmmm:”

Prof. Pecinovsky of the University of Missouri thinks (perhaps not quite the right verb) that the United States is “the belly of the beast” (þ InstaPundit), yet he continues to live here, when there are undoubtedly other countries to which he could emigrate. If he chooses to live in the belly of a beast, and to accept sustenance from it (a salary paid for by the taxpayers of Missouri), doesn’t that make him a metaphorical tapeworm?

Not to mention not-so-boldly going where Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn have metaphorically gone before, including this quote from Dohrn in 2007:

It was an incredible thing for him to say [Martin Luther King's assertion that the US was "the greatest purveyor of violence" in the world], the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth is my own country. There were certainly other purveyors of violence. I think that’s still true today. If we think it’s true today, that has incredible implications for all of us right now. We who are, as we used to say, in the belly of the beast … It again means not that we are the only purveyor of violence in the world, but that we have an extraordinary, special responsibility, not necessarily the most enviable one, of how to act here, inside the heart of the monster.

Video of Dohrn’s remarks here; the above passage comes about the five minute mark:

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With the world scheduled to come to end sometime tomorrow, I thought I’d be clear out the Firefox tabs I’ve had open for a while now and end on a clean slate. So, in somewhat random order (think of it as the William Boroughs Cut-Up Method of cut and pasting!), here goes:

• At the Anchoress’s blog, is revisionist punctuation “A Menace to Our Way of Life?” If so, I’d say it’s time to Eat, Shoot & Leave the offending periods and semicolons.

• DaTechGuy spots the left blowing a gasket that Texas conservatives are rewriting the leftwing revisionist textbooks of the past forty years or so. How dare you revise our revisionism — only we’re allowed to control history here in Oceania!

• Speaking of those who view 1984 as a user’s guide to power, Steve Hayward explores the Left’s omnipresent Totalitarian Temptation. Why is it so easy for them to fall in love with Big Brother?

• OK, one more riff on Orwell’s 1984. City Journal breaks down “The Washington Diet,” which for schoolkids will be enforced via two-way telescreens, with automated morning wake-up calls for the more tardy of the Airstrip One Youth League, if need be.

• The Politico on “Obama the Desperate.” Let’s hope we see a lot of these headlines between now and November of 2012.

• David Boaz of the Cato Institute quotes George Will on the self-described anarchists of Europe, “Anti-government mobs composed almost entirely of government employees going berserk about threats to their entitlements!” But other than being officially on the government payroll, anarchy and Big Government has always historically gone together like fist and glove.

• “Governor Cuomo says gay marriage is one of his top three priorities. Mayor Bloomberg says it is his number one priority.” Wow, who knew that building more bike lanes wasn’t Mayor Mike’s number one priority when it comes to the social re-engineering of Manhattan?

• “Prince Charles says Americans eat too much steak.” And they often live in unsightly giant McMansions, too. Though rarely as large as this one, with its enormous carbon footprint. For shame!

• “Same Roger Ebert Who Sees Coded Racism in ‘Food Stamps’ Publishes Excuse for Director’s Pro-Nazi Rant On His Journal.” For once though, Cannes had more sense.

• “In China, some new cities are ghost towns.” Thomas Friedman could not be reached for comment. But ahh, the remarkable efficiency of central planning.

• Investor’s Business Daily asks, “Has anyone stopped to think of what the world would be like if the environmentalists were in charge?” Wait, they’re not?

• “Believing in BBC’s ethos is equivalent to a faith, job tribunal rules.” Well, much of the left is the equivalent of an alternative religion, so that’s not too surprising.

Finally, “TV Ownership Down in America, Nielsen Says.” But James Lileks looks back fondly to when it was a way of life, complete with its own bible. But check out the letters from readers that were printed in the TV Guide from 1968 that Lileks is digitizing. As Lileks notes, “Compare to modern YouTube pages. Of course they got ranting stuff written in crayon on butcher paper, but in those days there were mechanisms in place to suppress those things, not give them a platform to be viewed by millions.”

This one is fun:

My compliments to ABC News. They needed only an hour and a half to tell us what happened at the Republican convention; it took CBS and NBC all evening long. Also, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley added a great deal of interest and, in most cases, understanding.

Mrs. Cal Heathman, Champaign, Ill.

Gore’s red-lining the Godwin meter and presumably declaring this week’s coming fascist state to America along the way certainly added a great deal of interest as well.

See you later today, tomorrow, and — with a little luck, possibly Sunday as well. But I’m definitely taking my Popeil Pocket Mezuzah everywhere I go on Saturday to avoid being smited, just to be on the safe side.

(Concept via Jimmie Bise.)

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In olden days, higher education used to be a way to learn more about God. Then it became a way to learn more about life, and how to function on a high level in the real world.

Beginning in the 1960s, academia slowly morphed into a method of forcing a particular worldview upon students, a trend that’s only accelerating, as several recent articles highlight.

First up, a look at Kate Swift, “The Scourge of the Feminist Word Police,” who decided to create her own Newspeak Dictionary:

If you’ve ever felt a twinge of anxiety at hearing someone use “humankind” as a substitute for mankind, or if you’ve winced at the proliferation of the politically correct suffix “person” — as in “chairperson,” or “policeperson” — when the more traditional “man” would be perfectly suitable, chances are you’ve suffered from the corrupting linguistic legacy of feminist writer Kate Swift. Swift, who died last week at 87, was one of a squadron of feminist language police whose crusade to remake language to suit their political agendas has wreaked havoc on everyday English.

Feminists had tried to reform language long before Swift and her fellow word scolds arrived on the scene. In 1949, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir charged that language was “inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices.” She advised that “women have to steal the instrument” and “use it for their own good.”

Swift and her co-author, Casey Miller, attempted precisely such a heist in their influential 1981 book, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing. The book had two main premises, both of them dubious. The first was that sexism and sexual discrimination were embedded in the English language. The second was that the language needed to be radically revised in order to change society’s attitudes and make it more inclusive.

Informed more by feminist ideology than linguistic scholarship, the book’s suggested recommendations ranged from the awkward to the downright absurd. For instance, judging the word “mankind” sexist, the authors recommended that it be replaced with “genkind.” Not content simply to ruin existing language, the authors also proposed feminist-friendly neologisms. Thus, “tey,” “ter” and “tem” were to become the sex-neutral surrogates for “he/she,” “his/her” and “him/her.”

Swift and Casey’s more eccentric suggestions failed to catch on, but their book proved a giant leap for genkind, unleashing a wave of feminist assaults on the English language. Picking up where The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing left off, a “feminist dictionary” soon announced in all seriousness that the word “brotherhood” could no longer be used to describe non-fraternal kinship because “it ignores generations of sisters.” Emboldened, feminists insisted that women must now be referred to as “wimmin,” and that history had to become “herstory.”

Had such linguistic absurdities remained confined to the pages of obscure feminist tracts, they would have been a merely an illiterate footnote to the history of modern English. But they became part of the cultural mainstream when the professional arbiters of language embraced the feminist reformation. And so the American Library Association adopted a resolution pledging to avoid supposedly sexist terminology, while the Linguistic Society of America established a Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the same purpose. Universities turned feminist recommendations into campus policies, and the worlds of publishing and journalism followed suit, ruining language use for new generations of speakers and writers.

And introspect, in light of some of the more recent obsessions on campus, the Past really was Pronoun.

Henry Kissinger once said, “I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject their [sic] discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimportant.”

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I’m pretty sure the left (and Lindsey Graham) has step #1 down absolutely stone cold:

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Related: “Dog Bites Man, Plane Lands Safely,” and . . .

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“Anarchy: Would someone please get the media a dictionary:”

You may have noticed over the weekend that most newspaper and TV reports blamed the violent London riots on anarchists. A new kind of anarchists, apparently, who believe in big government.

Just to make sure we correctly understood anarchy, we went to the dictionary to double check our understanding of the word:

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy.
Source: Wikipedia.org

Look how easy that was. It took us about two seconds to do what the media couldn’t bother doing.

Obviously, members of the left wing media would rather choke on their own vomit than admit the riots were caused by socialists and communists and union thugs and other assorted left wing lunatics demanding not just a continuation of the government gravy train, but more government, bigger government, all-encompassing government.

So they were magically transformed into anarchists who rioted in order to bring about a system that’s in direct contradiction of their own philosophy.

Not necessarily — ever since Stalin started labeling leftwing heretics as fascists in the 1920s, we spent nearly a century looking for fascism in all the wrong places. We shouldn’t be surprised that the common definition of anarchy suffered a similar fate.

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As Roger Kimball notes, “Future historians, looking back on this era, will marvel at its capacity for linguistic evasion:”

Never speak about a “global war on terror” when you can talk instead about “overseas contingency operations.” Don’t mention “Islamic terrorism” when “anti-Islamic activity” sounds so much nicer. And just the other day, struggling to find the right, i.e., the politically acceptable, i.e., the patently mendacious, words to describe the President’s Excellent Adventure in Libya, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes proffered this gem: “I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone. Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.” Orwell, or at least the guardians of Newspeak about whom Orwell wrote, would have been proud.

Contrast that to that remarkably blunt (not to mention desperate) language that Media Matters has taken to, in their efforts to aide the president’s reelection and agenda. The JournoList-affiliated Politico reports:

The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.

At the Right Sphere, Brandon Kiser is happy that “Media Matters Finally Fesses Up,” but notes how this new tone (to coin a phrase) could impact their non-profit tax status:

It is not about correcting misinformation to MMFA anymore. Their goal now is a “War on Fox News,” not as they see it as a media organization. Instead, they are treating it as a wing of the Republican Party. The cutesy-sounding mission of Media Matters to “correct conservative misinformation” is no longer even remotely appropriate. No, MMFA is a political group with $10 million-plus in annual funding designed to wage war against Fox News, and in their eyes the GOP and conservatives as a whole.Because of this, Media Matters should reconsider their 501(c)(3) status which is designated for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. MMFA no longer meets any of these qualifiers (it’s arguable they never did) and under the banner of waging a war against Fox News and the GOP puts them in an entirely different zip code.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air (who kindly links back here) finds the use of the word “sabotage” worrisome, but notes they’re finally giving up their fauz-credibility.

At the Tatler, Bryan Preston adds:

Take a look at just how low David Brock & co. intend to go to destroy the Fox News Channel. Like online ninjas!

Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor.

Let’s call this what it is: The politics of personal destruction. Only, it’s not even aimed at politicians, but at media executives (many of whom aren’t all that conservative, by the way — like any large corporation, Fox employs people of all political persuasions, and no political persuasion at all). Media Matters has shifted from its useless role as a “media monitor” to a probably equally useless role as Dumpster Diving for Democrats.

And then what happens? Where do they go after that, Kamikaze missions? Oh sorry — I suppose the correct Orwell meets Dr. Strangelove language would be kinetic man-caused incidents of collateral mutual impairments.

Related: Troglopundit: “This isn’t a blog: it’s a tactile opinion targeter.”

Targeter? Don’t let Paul Krugman hear you using that sort of language!

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“Senator Barack Obama in 2007: ‘Americans ‘Have a Right to Know’ Before Government Takes Military Action.’”

But it’s not really a military action military action, as Whoopie would say. It’s a time-limited, scope-limited kinetic military action with our forces volunteered by others, and in some ways, how it turns out is not on our shoulders. Which makes it different. So it’s got that going for it, at least.  

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Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty looks like he’s going to need a bigger, likely infinite list, as the Professor’s War meets the bottomless memory of YouTube.

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Smitty at Stacy McCain’s blog writes:

Oh, wait, a breaking terminology update:

a time-limited, scope-limited military action

is the new Kinetic Military Action. TLSLMA. That’s Like Saying Lying Makes Amends.
In this particular kerfuffle, as with the Obama Administration as a whole, the lesson is “Never send an academic to do a job requiring leadership.”

Blogger and frequent Tim Blair commenter Paco adds:

The Orwellian euphemisms used by the current crowd would be amusing if the underlying idiocy were not so dangerous for the country. It’s enough to make me want to engage in a time-limited, scope-limited, kinetic transfer of foot energy to the seat of the trousers of whoever is responsible for this alarming proliferation of nonsense.

H.L. Mencken wrote something about the inauguration speech of Warren G. Harding that could be applied to 99% of everything uttered by Obama and his minions: “It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh.”

I’ve gotten lots of mileage over the past few years out of Steven Den Beste’s quip that George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning for the rest of us, but a user’s manual for the left. As “The Professor’s War,” grinds on, as Charles Krauthammer dubbed it, given their obsessions with postmodern linguistics, perhaps we could say the same thing about the postmodern Ruling Class’s tendency to adopt for their own the euphemistic allocations first on display in Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern’s Dr. Strangelove.

Elsewhere in the left’s time-limited, scope-limited kinetic military police action against clear language, David Harsanyi asks, “What does a guy have to do to be called a terrorist these days?”

I’d quote from that well-written piece, but, speaking of Orwellian, I’d really rather not risk running afoul of the boys at Righthaven.

Update: “Newly taciturn president decides maybe he should say something about Libya after all,” Allahpundit writes:

No, he’s not doing it in the Oval Office. Like I said last night, that’s reserved for wars, not “time-limited, scope-limited military actions.” The venue will be the National Defense University in Washington. “A professor’s war” indeed.

7:30 p.m. ET on Monday. Everything becomes clear.

Will AP, Reuters and the NYT even bother to listen, or will they write their praise for the speech now, Laphamizing even before the transcript is released from embargo?

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From the folks who brought you “man-caused disasters,” the Wall Street Journal notes the latest buzzword from the Obaministration:

After weeks of internal debate on how to respond to uprisings in the Arab world, the Obama administration is settling on a Middle East strategy: help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait.

Instead of pushing for immediate regime change—as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya—the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling “regime alteration.”

Alterations? First David Brooks admires Obama’s trousers, and now the whole administration sounds like more like a house of dry-cleaning than a functioning White House.

(Speaking of which, as Bryan Preston notes at the Tatler, gas is over five dollars a gallon in Florida. “Reminder: Your president can do something useful about this, but he won’t.”)

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Christian Toto on why Captain America, as was said in 2006 recent reboot of Superman, will be espousing the virtues of “truth, justice…and all that other stuff:”

Here’s Joe Johnston, the director of the upcoming “Captain America: The First Avenger,” explaining why our red, white and blue superhero isn’t so American – never mind the moniker.

He was created as propaganda tool, but he soon became much more than that. There are all these incarnations over the decades, but the film is not a flag waver. It’s about a guy who wants to do the right thing, and that transcends all nationalities and borders. He’s going to do the right thing no matter what flag is on his chest.

So … Captain America really is Captain Every Country is Just as Noble as Every Other Country?

Or, to put it another way, Hollywood’s Captain America, just like Captain Unicorn before him, believes in American exceptionalism, just as he suspects the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Incidentally, Christian writes:

Captain America doesn’t involve the Iraq War or anything remotely controversial as far as the initial trailer suggests. It’s set during World War II, a conflict everyone save perhaps Ed Asner would describe as a noble effort by the U.S. military.

Oh, I suspect more than a few of the more nihilistic denizens of Hollywood beyond Ed have soured a bit on the Allies’ involvement in World War II, at least based on the content of Tinseltown’s high-end product over the last 15 years or so.

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“When I hear of an act of terror, an internal clock starts clicking,” Greg Gutfeld writes. “I wonder, how long before we find out the suspect is a radical Islamist.”

And then as must invariably follow, “how long before that affiliation is rejected as vital to the crime:”

Witness the murderous acts against our military in Frankfurt: it was only a matter of hours before the killer’s links to radical Islam were exposed. [QED -- ED] And it was only a few hours later, that we saw an Administration official dismiss that notion.

Here we have P. J. Crowley, bringing back memories — not only of Tucson, but of Ft. Hood, too.

Reporter: Even if somebody is acting alone, it’s not a terrorist attack?

Crowley: For example, was the shooting of congresswoman Gabby Giffords a terrorist attack. I mean, you have to look at the evidence, you have to look at the evidence and look at the motivation then you make a judgment and that is a process as far as I know that is ongoing.

Yeah. He went there.

P.J., which must stand for “poor judgment,” actually compared a horrible crime linked to radical Islam, to whatever was bubbling in Jared Loughner’s damaged head.

So does P.J. actually believe these crimes are alike? Is he that dim?

I mean, with that hypothetical yammer, Crowley not only minimized the nature of the terrorist threat, but also implied he still may believe the attack on Giffords was part of a greater movement.

And so a killer can shout Allahu Akbar — just like at Ft. Hood — and the Administration still won’t “commit.” They only see a man with no affiliation–because decades of ingrained political correctness have taught them to be fearful of pointing out that affiliation. It’s bigotry, after all.

As John Derbyshire wrote in the months after 9/11, better dead than rude. Besides, Arid Uka presents a bit of a poser to the American MSM. As an Albanian Kosovar, they can’t immediately blame his terrorism on his distaste of ObamaCare.

If we can still call it that, of course.

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“According to Maher, when you go too far to the Left, you end up on the Right,” NewsReal’s Walter Hudson writes, paraphrasing Maher’s latest sophistry:

It’s not unusual for Bill Maher to accuse his ideological opponents of being flat-earthers. But he took the concept to a new extreme over the weekend in his analysis of history and the political spectrum. According to Maher, when you go too far to the Left, you end up on the Right.

“Both [the Russian and French] revolutions got hijacked by the right-wing – and the Iranian Revolution,” Maher added.

However, Maher explained that you could argue the Russian Revolution was “hijacked by the left-wing,” but due to the nature of it being that far left, it was really right.

“I suppose people would say the Russian Revolution was hijacked by the left-wing,” Maher said. “I think when you go that far left – you’re really the right-wing. I consider Lenin and Stalin right-wingers. Don’t tell Rush Limbaugh.”

Well, that explains some of the crazier rhetoric from Frank Rich and Chris Matthews in recent years. Though as Andrew Breitbart asked Maher in September, “So you’re officially not a Libertarian anymore, right?”

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The Newspeak Dictionary, totally bitchin’ Valley Girl edition, like fer-sure!, as explored by former Ed Koch speechwriter Clark Whelton in City Journal this month. Whelton describes a series of interviews with potential Koch staffers fresh out of college in the mid-1980s. Their linguistic skills seemed to diminish in parallel with the rising costs of tuition:

As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that “like” had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. And something new had been added: “You know” had replaced “Ummm . . .” as the sentence filler of choice. The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding “and stuff” at the end. Their writing samples were terrible. It took eight tries to find a promising intern. In the spring of 1987 came the all-interrogative interview. I asked a candidate where she went to school.

“Columbia?” she replied. Or asked.

“And you’re majoring in . . .”

“English?”

All her answers sounded like questions. Several other students did the same thing, ending declarative sentences with an interrogative rise. Something odd was happening. Was it guerrilla grammar? Had college kids fallen under the spell of some mad guru of verbal chaos? I began taking notes and mailed a letter to William Safire at the New York Times, urging him to do a column on the devolution of coherent speech. Undergraduates, I said, seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.

By autumn 1987, the job interviews revealed that “like” was no longer a mere slang usage. It had mutated from hip preposition into the verbal milfoil that still clogs spoken English today. Vagueness was on the march. Double-clutching (“What I said was, I said . . .”) sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation (“So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”), made their entrance. I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English. At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.

And speaking of the Newspeak dictionary, on Thursday, Mark Steyn linked to this essay by journalist Jill Sligay at the Detroit Examiner titled, “Battle of the bailouts: Haters hate as Detroit brings sexy back.”

Naturally, by “haters,” she’s referring to Steyn, not the people who emailed or tweeted such comments as:

“F**k you, Mark Steyn” (South-Eastern Michigan Sports), “F**K YOU, MARK STEYN!!!” (Cletus Pages),”Mark Steyn is a Faggot” (Brandon A Jiles), and “Has anyone fed Mark Steyn a d*ck?“

And not to go all Jay Nordlinger on you, but isn’t the word “haters” itself remarkably ugly? The Gotham Resistance blog explored the sociolinguistics of the H-word a few years ago, in a post that’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time.

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“So with Europe changing its tune, will America’s chattering classes go unilaterally for multiculturalism now?”

Of course they will. It’s the option that requires the least amount of intellectual work:

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Found at Ann Althouse’s blog:

If “intellectual diversity” and “personal responsibility” have been deemed as code words of right-wing oppression, [It's a neocon plot; but then, so is everything--Ed] just what the hell words or phrases do they use when they are trying to talk about intellectual diversity or personal responsibility?

Hey, nobody said it was easy being in the campus closet as a Friend of Ayn:

You hide yourself in plain sight. You make comments that are carefully crafted to allow you to make small talk, and which will allow your colleagues to think you’re in agreement with them, but which nevertheless satisfy your own sense of integrity. You never lie. You just make comments and allow them to draw their own conclusions. A classic example is the way I’ll make comments about politics, saying things like “I don’t trust politicians, period.” My liberal colleagues will nod and agree. We’re all in agreement, they believe. It gets easy after a while. You make comments about Marxist ideology that are really rather neutral, such as how you see similarities between Marx’s views, and something else. You leave it unstated that in fact you think this is appalling, while they nod and smile at the continuing relevance of Marxism in today’s society. Everyone is happy. I don’t feel quite so happy when someone says something about “stupid f**king conservatives” (I’m quoting exact words here), but I just nod, and say “ugh-huh”.

Because otherwise, you’ve stumbled into the title scenario of Roger L. Simon’s recent book, and blacklisted yourself.

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