You just know a post is going absolutely nowhere when it starts out like this:
I sense the dark hand of George Lakoff in all of this.
You remember George Lakoff, don’t you? Lakoff was the mastermind academic who officiously volunteered to help the Democrats remake America’s political terminology. I’m not sure any of the following can be laid at Lakoff’s feet, but his game was garden variety exercises in Orwellian stuff like referring to reckless government expenditures as “investments” or a troop surge as an “escalation” or surrender as “redeployment.”
This, coming from the masters of Doublespeak™: the right-wing.
That wasn't enough for Mr Barnett though:
At one point in the interview, Pelosi talked about the Congressional Medal of Honor that was posthumously awarded to Jason Dunham last week. Here’s how Pelosi described Dunham’s heroism:
“I just had the privilege of meeting with the family of the young man who received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He jumped on a hand grenade and saved the lives of his other young people in his unit.”
I know the Democrats have developed as one of their pet Lakoffian tics the habit of describing our warriors as defenseless children. Thus, when Pelosi refers to Dunham as a “young man” and the men he saved as “other young people,” she’s merely falling into a bad habit.
But it’s a real bad habit; a truly offensive one. This is a matter of more than just mere semantics. Jason Dunham was a Marine. So, too, were the men he saved. They see themselves as warriors, and that’s what they are. The term “young people” is meant to demean them, and in Dunham’s case denies him the dignity that he has so completely earned.
Additionally, the failure to use the word “soldier”, "Marine" or any other term that acknowledges a connection between Dunham and the military is borderline grotesque. In Pelosi’s formulation, it almost sounds as if some random “young people” were frolicking in Iraq and stumbled upon a live grenade.
Jason Dunman was 22 years old when he died. How he cannot be described by anyone as a 'young man' is beyond me - especially when the person talking about him is a 56 year old woman, a mother and a grandmother.
Can't the right find anything better to nitpick about? There are, after all, 2 wars going on and I doubt very much that the troops over in Afghanistan and Iraq care one bit about how Mrs Pelosi appropriately described one of their fallen comrades.
But then what do you expect from someone who writes inane things like this?
3) Why did they do that? Why were so few forces in Baghdad?
To know the truth, we’ll probably have to wait for the memoirs to be written by the war’s principals. And even then, most of those will probably be self-serving and dishonest. The most reasonable explanation is that the Bush administration was so fearful of casualties that it hesitated to put a significant amount of troops into harm’s way.
I think I've now heard practically every possible excuse for Bush's failed war planning.
Update: Here's Bush being 'borderline grotesque' as well in October, 2006.
Every day, thousands of these young men and women risk their lives overseas to make sure their families, and all of our families, are kept safe in the United States.
[...]
Many of these young men and women have given their lives for this belief.
He has obviously fallen prey to the evil Lakoff and his Orwellian type of Doublespeak™ too. The horror!!
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