The Washington Times describes “a new way of seeing” a certain something, the word for which is no longer used officially.
It’s official. The U.S. is no longer engaged in a “war on terrorism.” Neither is it fighting “jihadists” or in a “global war.” … “The President does not describe this as a ‘war on terrorism,’” said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, who outlined a “new way of seeing” the fight against terrorism. The only terminology that Mr. Brennan said the administration is using is that the U.S. is “at war with al Qaeda.” …
As for the “war on terrorism,” Mr. Brennan said the administration is not going to say that “because ‘terrorism’ is but a tactic — a means to an end, which in al Qaedas case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate.” … While Mr. Brennan acknowledged that al Qaeda and its affiliates are active in countries throughout the Middle East and Africa, he also said that “portraying this as a ‘global’ war risks reinforcing the very image that al Qaeda seeks to project of itself — that it is a highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate.” …
But Mr. Brennan lamented “inflammatory rhetoric, hyperbole, and intellectual narrowness” surrounding the national security debate and said Mr. Obama has views that are “nuanced, not simplistic; practical, not ideological.”
I think Mr. Brennan is mistaken in that last assertion. The President’s views aren’t ‘nuanced’, but ‘obtuse’, which the dictionary defines as “lacking sharpness or quickness of sensibility or intellect … difficult to comprehend : not clear or precise in thought or expression.” President Obama’s choice of words leave the listener completely the dark about what events in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East are all about. To all intents and appearances, there are military units in those places doing something, fighting someone — and it is not always al-Qaeda. Iran for example, is also opposed to al-Qaeda, yet it is is also attacking US and Western interests. ‘Nuance’ is not a synonym for fuzzy.
The British Home Office — which recently barred Michael Savage from traveling to the UK on the grounds that he was something — has made similarly poor choice of words in describing its new “family intervention program”, which sounds an awful lot like the way General Templar used to fight terrorists — back when they existed — during the Malayan emergency. On its website, the Home Office describes its plans for dealing with troublesome families:
In some communities there are a small number of highly problematic families that account for a disproportionate amount of anti-social behaviour. They are well known to many service providers and enforcement agencies. Some families have up to twenty different organisations involved with them. … despite months and years of intervention from agencies, they continue to damage themselves, their children and the community around them. …
Family intervention projects work to turn around the behaviour of families and reduce their impact on their community. … There are three distinct levels of interventions which are used according to a family’s needs and the impact their behaviour is having on the community. Different levels of intervention may be used at different times as circumstances and behaviour change.
Most projects provide an outreach service for families who are responsible for anti-social behaviour in their home, and who are risk of being evicted. However, services can also be provided in units managed by the family intervention project but dispersed in the community.
At the most intensive level, families who require supervision and support on a 24 hour basis stay in a core residential unit. Upon satisfactory completion of a programme, the family can move into a managed property.
This sounds an awful lot like the prison system, although perhaps I should use the word “corrections”. Despite the vast increase in our technical power to communicate, much of the message has been distorted, even debased by the use of misleading and dishonest terms. A society in which there are warlike activities without a war; enemies without a conflict; open-air prisons without convictions; and a program of informers in the name of “honest debate” is a potentially dangerous one. No, scratch that. It is a community in which hope is changed from cash for clunkers to clunkers for cash.
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“”"At the most intensive level, families who require supervision and support on a 24 hour basis stay in a core residential unit.”"”"
Ohhhh . . . sort of like the old debtors prisons, where the whole family was incarcerated.
wretchard:
I suggest “re-education” as the correct euphemism to go along with the supervised places they will live. Seems more definitive doesn’t it?
Obama is becoming Carter II. But I don’t think anyone is surprised.
But GWB did the heavy lifting and I think we can ride out Obama without another 911-type attack.
There is a process of consensual self-deception, which when carried to its limit, completely perverts the truth. There was a time when people who were wholly dependent on public moneys were referred to as “wards of the state”. Now they are described as “underprivileged”, when what is really meant is that they are unemployable. Entire underprivileged “families”, a term of convenience used to describe people living more or less under one roof, with no common father, perhaps not a common mother, have become packs of predators, only barely contained by a toothless “community police”, dozens of welfare and “protection” agencies and faceless armies of bureaucrats. So the new idea is to “intervene” by sticking them in cell blocks, oops, “core housing” until they are safe enough to be let out into “managed housing”, in other words trustee housing, for those familiar with other terminology.
Some bureaucracies not only do not know what they are talking about, they don’t want to know and would be glad if nobody else did. When George Orwell wrote 1984 it was explicitly modeled on the result of a mental merger between Stalin’s Communist Party and the BBC, in which Orwell worked and used as a template for the Ministry of Truth. He broadcast bulletins from the actual Room 101, one of the several radio studios in that facility. In the world of 1984 it is no longer necessary to make sense; it is only necessary to have won.
This kind of “rebranding” has been going on for a long time. But it seems to have picked up lately. And there is a certain blatant shamelessness in today’s barely concealed efforts that makes you think, “they’re going for the kill”; oops, I mean, “they’re doing it for the children.”
“Nuance”—do you remember the old TV commercial where the model says “don’t hate me for being beautiful?” “Nuance,” in current day politician-speak, translates out as “don’t argue with me when I say something that is incredibly stupid, its just rude and it hurts my feelings. Don’t try to make me out as being as stupid or corrupt as I am.” You just don’t understand the nuances of it all? Then just play your role as a fool and pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain. Things could get ugly and uncomfortable for the Important People if you don’t. When you hear some politician talking about “nuances” that’s just a code word for “I’m lying to you.”
I truly wish that Ambrose Bierce was still around today to make an updated copy of the Devil’s Dictionary.
In 2,500 years we’ve gone from the Greeks who questioned everything about reality and man’s place in it to the Obamadroids who know everything, question nothing, and couldn’t recognize reality if it hit them in the ass – and we’re still to believe that humanity is “progressing” towards a good end?
FYI: The GB government is also “encouraging” families in the Family Intervention Program to install CCTV cameras in their homes. 1984 indeed.
FYI: The GB government is also “encouraging” families in the Family Intervention Program to install CCTV cameras in their homes.
And my guess is that today, more than any time in history, far fewer citizens — conditioned by reality shows, by celebrities “living publicly,” by the near death of the concept of shame — would blanch at reading that.
I see that President Obama’s effort to turn the entire health care industry into a ward of the Democratic Party (giving new meaning to the term “ward healer”) is now called “Insurance Reform.” This is a little like calling what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki “Urban Redevelopment.” Wait. The Democrats redeveloped Detroit, didn’t they? I’ll have to rethink this comment.
I have long contended that many, many people read 1984 and rather than being reviled by it, took it as an instruction manual.
This move by the Brits proves it.
Newspeak, Oceania beat them to it.
Never ever trust the Joker.
” … the Obamadroids who know everything, question nothing, and couldn’t recognize reality if it hit them in the ass …” It is hitting them in the ass, at Congressional town hall meetings, and they are calling it astroturf.
Sounds like Philly, in unbroken governing by the Democratic Party for 60 years, or 3 generations.
despite months and years of intervention from agencies, they continue to damage themselves, their children and the community around them. …
Without casting aspersions, merely offering a Thesis for Socratic dialectics, why do societal ills still beset Philly (and the rest of American cities) after 6 decades of enlightened Democratic rule?
Are you allowed to ask that?
I have had my disagreements with President George W. Bush, the greatest being his inability or unwillingness to call the war what it was, a war declared by Arab and Persian Muslim terrorists in 1979 against the West in general and the United States in particular, and everything it and we stand for, opting instead for the mushy non-descriptive War On Terror. So while there was a war on terrorists, I agree with the Obama administration on this one thing, that there never was, nor could there be, a war on terror. Terror was simply a tactic in the terrorists’ war against us. What I fear is that the Obama administration, in declaring the war on terrorism dead, will also, as a matter of nuance, quietly declare the war on terrorists also dead.
Brennan says the war’s against
Those known to be al-Qaedas
And all the others we have fenced
Are simply freedom fightahs
That’s why we’re closing down the clink
In Cuba where we hold ‘em
If we’re nice to them we all think
They’ll show their hands and fold ‘em
Iran now we think is a plus
Elections there are crookit
But Acorn does the same for us
It works and you can book it
The Norks can seize our womenfolk
And hold them both for hostage
We get them back for pigs in poke
Don’t watch us make the sausage
Nuance is as nuance does
The world is just our plaything
And we’ll continue thinking fuzz
Until it’s that doomsday thing
One ought to ask what one can learn from French history so that an experience such as Vichy can be avoided in the United States. Although the United States is lucky not to have a statesman both as capable and as devoted to defeatism as Pierre Laval, the United States has elected leadership that avoids talking about victory. Whenever one fights a war that one’s elected political leadership is not interested in winning, there is a distinct limit to how much soldiers can accomplish.
Without casting aspersions, merely offering a Thesis for Socratic dialectics, why do societal ills still beset Philly (and the rest of American cities) after 6 decades of enlightened Democratic rule?
Are you allowed to ask that?
No. You are not. Please report to room 101 at the headquarters of MiniObama for having dared to ask the question. This is not a request.
Don’t worry comrade–we will cure you of your anti-social tendencies. And by the way, do you have an abnormal fear of rats?
☠ ☠☠
I don’t mind calling this war The War against al queda. It’s a pinpoint in the darkness. We all know the war will expand to include their allies and friends. It’s worth a try. Perhaps congress should issue such a declaration and make it official so the military can unleash hell on the enemy.
We can rename it later if we so choose.
WOAQ is an odd acronym, tho.
Nuance is as nuance does
I like it, Walt.
And in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “stupid is as stupid does.”
The question of the day is whether the two sayings are totally equivalent.
Obama is not calling it a war on Terror because he is sympathetic to Muslim terrorists himself. Being of Muslim background, and perhaps a Muslim still. He certainly shares their core assumptions and hatred of the US as witnessed by 20 years at Trinity United.
As for the family intervention program, it’s a feminist and female dream. The Mommy State watching everything, but doing nothing. No one goes to jail, not even the usual goon squads as seen in the Town Hall Meetings with SEIU goons roughing up protesters.
Which, btw, I predicted. It was as obvious as the calendar.
The weakness of the Mommy state is that the whole thing including rebranding can be kicked over by the usual assortment of violent men. The jackboot in the face, only works as long as there is money and power to make the jackboot hit the face. Not even the Roman Emperors could manage that forever, and the experience of the Roman Emperors after Augustus is like the dictators after Stalin. Not one that inspires much loyalty or confidence in continued succession. Eventually a horse will be a tribune, and the Praetorian Guard will auction off the office of Emperor.
Orwell, like many writers, overestimated the power of the pen. As opposed to the power of the coin, and the sword.
Orwell, like many writers, overestimated the power of the pen. As opposed to the power of the coin, and the sword.
That’s an interesting concept Whiskey–the Trinity of society. The pen-what you are told to do–the coin–that which allows you to put food in your mouth and a roof over your head–and the sword which shall destroy you if you don’t abide by what the pen has decreed you must do.
There was a saying current about thirty years ago in the Philippines that the keys to political power were gold, goons and guns. In a dictatorship only one side had the 3G’s. In a democracy everyone could play. Nobody ever mentioned the pen, unless it was wielded sharp end foremost. Over that same period America was perceived, with envy, as the place where “real democracy” happened; where ballots were sacrosanct and political thuggery was the rare exception rather than the rule. It would be tragic if the way of the 3Gs took over in America. No matter who won, everyone will have lost is such a time comes to pass. The world needs a beacon; the last best hope must never go out, though who can guarantee that?
Obama isn’t the cause so much as the consequence of a long period of polarization, a sign of the times, but not the time itself. The challenge, I think, will be to find a way to maintain civility and to achieve reconciliation despite all that’s gone before. It may be too early to speak of epilogues before the end of the story has come. But time marches on, often too quickly for us to notice, and we will reach the end of things soon enough.
Relieved to see whiskey still posting. I was fearful he had said goodbye recently at a certain gym near Pittsburgh.
I think the strategy of Urkle and company is to make the country a screwed up rat hole. He’ll make it so that the hordes of breathless 3rd world refugees yearning to breathe free will stop dead in their tracks. When they finally reach the border, they’ll see how ucking fuglee it’s become. They’ll heave a collective sigh (because collective will be the only thing that’s allowed) turn around and trudge away to someplace else.
Re post #23, and maybe the plan is to make the folks who didn’t vote for hOpenChains give up, pack up and leave.
wretchard
The President’s views aren’t ‘nuanced’, but ‘obtuse’, which the dictionary defines as “lacking sharpness or quickness of sensibility or intellect … difficult to comprehend : not clear or precise in thought or expression.” Obtuse in a prison we know too.
Warden Samuel Norton: I have to say that’s the most amazing story I’ve ever heard. What amazes me
most is that you were taken in by it.
Andy Dufresne: Sir?
Warden Samuel Norton: It’s obvious this fellow Williams is impressed with you, he hears your tale of woe
and naturally wants to cheer you up. He’s young, not terribly bright, it’s not surprising he wouldn’t know what a state he put you in.
Andy Dufresne: Sir, he’s telling the truth.
Warden Samuel Norton: Let’s say for the moment this Blatch does exist. You think he’d just fall to his knees
and cry: “Yes, I did it, I confess! Oh, and by the way, add a life term to my sentence.”
Andy Dufresne: You know that wouldn’t matter. With Tommy’s testimony I can a new trial.
Warden Samuel Norton: That’s assuming Blatch is still there. Chances are excellent he’d be released by now.
Andy Dufresne: Well they’d have his last known address, names of relatives. It’s a *chance*, isn’t it.
[Norton shakes his head]
Andy Dufresne: How can you be so obtuse?
Warden Samuel Norton: What? What did you call me?
Andy Dufresne: Obtuse. Is it deliberate?
Warden Samuel Norton: Son, you’re forgetting yourself.
Andy Dufresne: The country club will have his old time cards. Records, W-2s with his name on them.
Sir, if I ever get out, I’d never mention what happens here.
I’d be just as indictable as you for laundering that money.
[Norton slaps the table]
Warden Samuel Norton: Don’t you *ever* mention money to me again,
you sorry SON OF A BITCH! NOT IN THIS ROOM, NOT ANYWHERE.
/IMDB
Our current political circumstances pose a serious question that, for the life of me I can’t come up with an answer to.
First some background; I served in the Marines in the early sixties. After serving I got to live the classic comfortable middle class American life (even including some bumps along the way). Though now retired, I built a business that over the years employed hundreds (not all at once but as many as 165 at its peak). I was a $1 per year volunteer reservist on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Mountain Rescue service which required 120 hours of P.O.S.T. (peace officer standard training) and many hours in the field; In other words, a “sheepdog”.
I read BC daily and sometimes, though very rarely, comment. I recognize many kindred spirits and feel comfortable among (virtual) friends. It is we who are probably considered the greatest (philosophical) threat to the current regime. If our worst case scenario is realized it is we who will hear the proverbial knock on the door at 2 AM.
It is easy to fantasize a response to an ACORN thug but the regime is too clever to ever send one of theirs. They have already loaded city governments and police administrations with their operatives at the top. They are the ones who will do the sending.
I have friends and neighbors whose sons and grandsons served in the Marines who are now full time peace officers. I care deeply about these young men and all the other men and women just like them.
My question is: what will they do if ordered to do the knocking and how should they be met?
Clarity uber alles. Richard Fernandez, you are a treasure. God Bless you Sir. Keith
The challenge, I think, will be to find a way to maintain civility and to achieve reconciliation despite all that’s gone before. It may be too early to speak of epilogues before the end of the story has come. But time marches on, often too quickly for us to notice, and we will reach the end of things soon enough.
Reconciliation comes after the threat is over, and only with those willing to let go of “all that’s gone before.” Or of all that caused what went before anyway. It’s something Americans have historically been good at. Hitchens just had an article (linked by Instapundit) discussing that. But like so much about “American character” today, you wonder if we’re still the same people. Some of us are, some of us aren’t. I think the coming, ah, event, will decide which group get’s to carry on under the “America” brand. There is a group that will carry out an earnest reconciliation if it wins, and another group that will prefer to lord it over the group that lost. “I won” is not much of a start at reconciliation. Hopefully the side that likes to say that won’t get to much longer.
The saeculum is turning.
My question is: what will they do if ordered to do the knocking and how should they be met?
There is a very non-nuanced answer to that question, and you know what it is as well as I do. I hope to God your friends and neighbors taught their sons and grandsons well enough that they know the answer too, because nobody get’s to vote present if that referrendum ever comes up.
duplicate
Obtuse being a state of lacking the ability to comprehend deep subjects.
Abstruse being a manner of presenting a subject in a way that is more complex than average mental acuity can grasp with average mental exercise.
Recondite being the synonym of the latter. Stupid a synonym of the former.
As in…,
The administrations efforts to make recondite the effort to defeat the use of terror and those who would use the act of terrorism as not just a tactic but an end in itself, is considered obtuse by those folks who have struggled with the complexities and long term implications of the War on Terror.
Just because it is a bad name, does not make it a bad idea.
If indeed stupid is as stupid does, then stupid does invite Al Queda to do terror. Stupid will die. The Obama administration specifically and leftists generally are not just playing with words, not just adjusting the symbols, they are will fully ignoring the dangers of very twisted but also very real traditions of killing that many like Al Queda represent.
The approach president Obama’s office of Health Care Reform informants proposes for Town Halls, which amounts to 1) close your eyes 2) cover your ears and 3) sing loudly the praises of the plan, is designed to overwhelm opposition to the plan.
While allowing the president the ability to say he heard no opposition, saw no opposition and spoke to no opposition it has the profound result of ignoring the 200 pound beast in the room called reality.
This is also what the president is proposing in place of the global war on terror.
II can see Bob Newhart dealing with it, “Okay Mr. Corleone, Please, ignore your wife’s crying, just forget about your daughters honor for a minute and lets all give Pauly a hug. Okay? Can’t we all just get along?
JMH @ #28
I really don’t believe the answer is that simple. I have a strong affinity to the currently serving officers. I know that they tend to develop a “them/us” mentality over time. The criminals are “them” writ large.
If we are successfully branded as criminals (right-wing extremists) by the regime then the officers may have little compunction in carrying out orders.
Thus my conundrum.
oneye, We The People won’t know what our beloved Sheepdogs will do if ordered to conduct dynamic entry search and seizure raids in the middle of the night to disarm and terrorize us until the orders are given and either obeyed or disobeyed.
Military men and law enforcement officers can only defend the Constitution from the domestic enemies their civilian masters sic ‘em on.
If the domestic enemies become their masters, we’re screwed.
Which we are. Well and truly.
In the case of open civil bloodletting between those who wish this country destroyed, remade, reinvented, and changed and those who stand against such, the active duty military components will take the side chosen for them by the chain of command. This Republic will be allowed to die before a military junta overthrows the idiots the electorate voted for. The military is the only island of competence in the fedgov. I don’t question their patriotism at all. They will do their duty, as God gives them light to see that duty. I would expect those who cannot abide what their chain of command demands of them to get out as soon as they can, but until they can leave I would expect them to perform the duties assigned to them as professionals. A larger percentage than you or I will be comfortable admitting will abide what their chain of command requires of them, some enthusiastically. Mission refusal, mutiny, sedition, coups d’etat and military juntas are Banana Republic crap. Any Republic “saved” by such means is no Republic at all.
Most of our Sheepdogs will do what they are told because of what they have been told about the “child-abusing, baby-raping, religious nut-cases” they’re doing it to. The children they immolate will be unfortunate “collateral damage” and the homes they wreck with their Combat Engineer Vehicles and CS gas dispensers and flame throwers won’t be homes, they’ll be “militant resister compounds.”
The Psychological Warfare Preparation of the Battlefield that will allow our Sheepdogs to live with what they will soon be doing to us has been underway for a long time. You have a narrow and rapidly closing window of opportunity to persuade, change and influence any close relatives you have among the Forces of Order.
I really don’t believe the answer is that simple.
If it comes to 2 am knocks on the door, the answer really is that simple. Not pleasant or easy to accept perhaps, but simple.
The complex question is how to avoid getting to there in the first place. Even that really isn’t that complicated, we know the sort of people we need to stop electing and the institutions we need to dismantle and recycle.
alexis/15; you are way ahead of our president, who said we cannot expect the war to end with a surrender. If an enemy is forced to back a leader who can and will enforce peace on his own people, that leader may well end up in a signing ceremony on the fantail of a warship. Obama’s thinking stops terribly early on this most important world-historical topic. somebody send him some books, and hurry! he has years of reading to catch up and he’s already president, jeeeeeez.
Tcobb @ 16: HEH! Thank you for the clarification comrade, I have learned to love my new alien overlords. Can’t say I haven’t learned anything from watching The Simpsons all these years.
Buddy @ 35: Here’s President Obama on history: “”I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News.” Ummm, maybe they all look alike, Mr. President, but that WASN’T the Emperor on the USS Missouri.
Here’s a sincerely chilling video President Obama: I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking, I just want them to get out of the way”
.
When he announces that he is “the President” the crowd of bloody Jacobins goes crazy with triumphalist glee.
I knew it was going to be bad when my liberal friends started sending me emails that argued that the only reason to vote against Obama was racism. And these are the people who consider themselves “open to other ideas, sensitive to other people’s values, yadda yadda.”
Remember, at the end of the French Revolution, the Jacobins ended up cutting each other’s heads off, including St. Robespierre, who Wikipedia informs us … largely dominated the Committee of Public Safety and was instrumental in the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror, which ended with his arrest and execution in 1794.
I have learned not to expect my liberal friends to be actually liberal, in the sense of personal liberty and responsibility. When I call them on it, they are not embarrassed in the least by their shameless, despotic lust for power over the rest of us.
I think they are going crazy now, though. For the past 8 years they have lived in a frenzy of hatred for Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Republicans and America (well, the last isn’t new, it’s the cornerstone) and now they have the desperately longed-for “power” in President Obama’s terms – and the world refuses to bow down and kiss their ring.
How frustrating must that be?
Now that the Global War on Terror, and we’re simply “at war with al Qaeda.” Is Afghanistan the Next Vietnam yet?”
WASHINGTON (AP) – An incoming adviser to the top U.S. general in Afghanistan predicted Thursday that the United States will see about two more years of heavy fighting and then either hand off to a much improved Afghan fighting force or “lose and go home.”
David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who will assume a role as a senior adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has been highly critical of the war’s management to date. He outlined a “best-case scenario” for a decade of further U.S. and NATO involvement in Afghanistan during an appearance at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Under that timeline, the allied forces would turn the corner in those two years, followed by about three years of transition to a newly capable Afghan force and about five years of “overwatch.”
“We’ll fight for two years and then a successful transition, or we’ll fight for two years and we’ll lose and go home,” Kilcullen said.
“I think we need to persist,” he said, but with “some pretty significant limits on how much we’re prepared to spend, how many troops we’re prepared to send, how long we can do this for.”
I haven’t seen it anywhere, what’s our “Exit Plan” here? For that matter, what is our goal, what is our strategic win/lose here? President Obama has already said we’re not aiming for something as stupid and old-fashioned as “victory” in Afghanistan.
Nuanced means that He is the only One with the sophistication to understand the community which needs his organizational skills. Basically we’re too stupid. Selling a sellout as an improvement is Orwellian and condescending.
This is one for the time honored phrase “Tell it to the Marines”
Nuance described John Kerry. Love him or hate him, he was quite experienced and worldly, urbane and well read, and had served, however briefly, in combat. None of this describes Obama, Axelrod, Emmanuel, nor most in the cabinet nor democrat congressional leadership. History and warfare are black boxes to this crowd, as is honor, and it is clear that they still do not understand the responsibility that goes with real power.
Surely they can get law enforcement assets to raid a Waco compound or the homes of clearly disruptive individuals, but a pattern of sequestering citizens will certainly fail. Where will they put them all? What law will they be charged with violating? At what point will they encounter resistance? Do they really believe, does anyone believe that the military command structure will allow massive Mil Ops against citizens within our borders?
A political problem in this nation will be won or lost on election day. This great nation will not fail due to the ill advised delusions of grandeur of a pitiful minority backed up by Acorn and union goon mobs.