“Political language,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” When government action can only be defended by arguments “too brutal for most people to face,” governments reliably brutalize the language, resorting to “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

The Bush administration introduced any number of such fuzzwords to the political lexicon: “regime change,” “enhanced interrogation,” and “self-injurious behavior incidents” (Pentagon jargon for suicide attempts by Gitmo prisoners — sorry, “enemy combatants.”)

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