Harpo Jaeger dot com

The dangers of euphemisms

01 Nov 2009
  1. Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.
  2. Collateral damage.
  3. The Internet Freedom Act.

What do these things actually mean? Answers:

  1. Illegal wiretapping (courtesy of the Bush administration).
  2. Dead civilians (courtesy of just about everyone ever).
  3. For-profit bandwidth throttling (courtesy of Sen. John McCain, #1 beneficiary of telecom lobby money)

Honestly, I’m pretty pissed of at Sen. McCain. Every time I think he’s reestablished himself as a paragon of GOP morality in an ever-more-decadent political climate, he slips up again. Given the state of rural broadband, there are a lot of people who can get service from only one ISP, and the idea that that ISP should have the right to control what that person does and doesn’t see is just ridiculous.

Dear GOP: The only thing your insistence on absolute (there it is again) government non-interventionism does is let someone else do the intervening. If you don’t make it illegal for someone to take away someone else’s civil liberties, rest assured that someone will find a way to do it, and to make money off it. Healthcare. Social Security. Internet.

America, wake up and smell the coffee. The people defending corporations and saying that they need protection from the big bad government are getting paid to do so. The reality is that a culture of profit in this country is deeply entrenched. Government regulations aren’t changing that. We are not poised on the brink of communism, despite what John Boehner, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh would like you to think. This country is more firmly capitalist than perhaps any other.

So now, can we make it a little more moral? Or is that too much to ask of you right-wing GOP extremists who care about nothing but where your campaign money’s coming from? Now, I know I’m sounding like just another left-wing nutjob, but Matt Yglesias was right when he said that Alan Grayson had broken an unspoken rule. And Barney Frank’s comment about Grayson was just as accurate. If the left would just stop bowing to the GOP’s attention to minute details and stick to the moral message, we’d win. I happen to think we’re right on both fronts, so I fully support and engage in debate on financial details of Democrat’s plans, but I think that the reason we’re bogged down in that is that we’ve lost sight of the moral message. If we worked to reframe the debate in terms of “whose political morals are in support of the people?”, we’d practically have won. If we can talk to Americans in terms they understand about moral differences, instead of leaving that entirely to the GOP, they’d listen. Democrats have never been good at this – Grayson is refreshing.

Let’s follow his example. No more dodging points and hiding behind euphemisms. The right does out of dishonesty. The left does it out of inaptitude. If we both stopped, we’d have one person saying “I want to ensure that corporations continue to profit” and another saying “I want to ensure that you have money to stay healthy”.

The choice is clear.