When words get weaponized - We're left, they're wrong

If Carl Von Clausewitz was right when he said that "war is politics by other means," then it must certainly be true that politics is war by other means. Instead of fighting for the future of our country in a series of pitched street battles, we have stylized our perpetual war by channeling it into our political system. Make no mistake; politics is a war for the future, not a series of banal layers of management fighting for spoils. Just as the capture of any particular unpopulated hill in a war can be considered worth risking human life, things like supplemental appropriations and tax policy are small battles that contribute to the larger campaigns in the ongoing civil war.

In war, it stands to reason that barring such actions that would precipitate prosecution (such as bribery and actual violence), anything can be used as a weapon when power is at stake.

This extends to the use of language as a weapon. As I discussed at length last semester, the Republicans have been extremely successful at the use of words as weapons, especially in the case of the estate tax. With a minimum of protestations from the media, the Republicans greatly helped their (successful) campaign to repeal the estate tax by referring to it as "the death tax." This was a complete lie -- the estate tax is not a tax on death; it is a tax on the transfer of wealth between generations. In fact, 98 percent of people pay no tax upon death and the majority of estate tax are paid by around 5000 wealthy families. No mind, whether or not it was a tax on death, it was called "the death tax" by every Republican on every talk show in America. Coincidentally, this is yet another place where the "liberal media" argument falls apart. Despite the fact that the Republicans were flat-out misrepresenting something, the only people who ever called them on the lie were the Democratic partisans who debated them. The supposedly "neutral" hosts were too cowed by the fear of being labeled as "biased" to stand up to this Newspeak.

Nowadays, the newest case of the political manipulation of words is in regards to "privatization" of Social Security. Ever since someone first got the idea that Social Security should be changed from a government entitlement into some sort of personal savings account scheme, the operative word has been "privatization," which was good, since most people associate the word with successful privatizations of state-owned enterprises, especially in Europe and Latin America.

The Cato Institute funded the "Project on Social Security Privatization," researchers from which testified before President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security.

Now that many people think that trusting the Enrons and WorldComs of the world with their money is not much better than trusting the government with it, Social Security privatization supporters have stopped using the p-word, which hasn't stopped their Democratic opponents for attempting to connect their Republicans with the now-unpopular term.

In a memo to Republican candidates, National Republican Campaign Committee Communications Director Steve Schmidt and Deputy Communications directory Carl Forti said "?some reporters -- even some national reporters -- continue to inaccurately describe the concept of personal accounts as privatization. To the extent that reporters are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in the Democrat strategy? they are using the power of the press to promote inaccurate Democrat spin and taking sides in the midterm elections." In English, Schmidt and Forti are essentially issuing a recall on a product that their party released.

Their strategy seems to be similar to one that they're very familiar with -- branding anyone in the press who won't tow their party line in the press as a liberal. Mainly for fear of playing into claims that they are, in fact, biased, specific reporters say nothing, hoping instead to kiss up to Republicans with fawning hagiographies such as NBC's shameful propaganda piece from 2001, Inside the Real West Wing.

Journalists should not be concerned about being called liberal -- they should be more concerned with doing what journalists should do, which is getting the truth about matters that people care about. Of course, that's easy to say for me, someone who doesn't get his sustenance from working for the News-Letter. Republicans will only be stopped from controlling the dialogue when journalists stand up as a profession and refuse to be suckered into treating Republicans with kid gloves when they claim bias.

Anything less would be unilateral surrender to the Fox News style of reportage, which is enough to make even a news junkie like me switch from the nightly news to Junkyard Wars or SpongeBob SquarePants.