President Bush vs. Words

Just a quick post today … sorry, it’s been one of those days.

I was listening to President Bush carefully referring to the economic “slowdown” as he denied that there’s any chance that this is a recession, and I was thinking … he likes to parse things, doesn’t he? Mostly, he likes to deny the applicability of bad-sounding words.

For example, he prefers to call waterboarding, which is clearly torture and for which we prosecuted Japanese troops after the Second World War, and “aggressive interrogation technique.”

When different factions are fighting for control of Iraq, he was very insistent that it wasn’t a civil war, though what the difference would be was pretty unclear.