Words Mean Things

I've been wanting to write for a while now. So much has happened this summer to comment on, and so little time.

I missed several stories to comment on:

- Sen. Dick ("the turbin") Durbin's outrageous comments from the floor of the U.S. Senate equating U.S. soldier's treatment of detainees at Gitmo with Nazi atrocities, the Soviet gulags, and Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia. It was a deeply offensive and heinous comment, exposing the Democrat party's true thinking about the War on Terror and their knee-jerk tendency to label America as the worst offender in history. It was appalling and it deserved a resignation.

- Supreme Court rulings allowing the seizure of private property by local governments and disallowing the display of the Ten Commandments. This year has been an awful year for the Court, with one disastrous and activist decision after another being decided wrongly and not in the spirit of the Constitution.

- Gitmo itself, with the left in this country (Democrats, mainstream media, academics) throwing everything they have to undermine our war efforts in order to bring down the President that they clearly despise. They're in hyperbolic overdrive as they whine and wring their hands and moan and wail about the damage that Gitmo has done to our reputation around the world. In fact, it is the assaultive hyperbole that is harming our reputation.

The connecting thread in all of these stories is the damage done to political discourse in this country by the abuse of language on the part of the left. Words mean things, specific things, or at least they used to until the demagogues on the left got hold of them. Their talent, their particular talent honed to a sharp edge during 30 years of the abortion debate, is to take words and stretch and abuse them until they have stripped all meaning out of them and they are just useful weapons.

Some examples, from recent stories:

- Gulag: Dick Durbin and his crowd can repeat every day of the year, as they do, that our terrorist detainee camp at Guantanemo Bay in Cuba (GITMO) is a "gulag", but that doesn't make it true. As many on the right have now reminded them, the gulag was an chain of hundreds of camps where dissidents were sent to be worked to death or starved. Millions died at the hands of brutal communist tyrants.

Somehow, the no. 2 ranking Democrat leader in the U.S. Senate cannot tell the difference between that, or the Nazi death ovens, and the treatment of violent terrorists at a U.S. military base. Nor can Time Magazine, which ran the gulag analogy with a barbed wire photo in a cover story about Gitmo. Appalling.

Durbin's comments, and Time Magazine's story (as with Newsweek's Quran trashing story before it), have been picked up by Al Jazeera news network for propaganda purposes in the islamic military world. Nice. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It's appalling.

By the way, I shouldn't have to say this but because of the distortion of words on the left, I will - Gitmo is not a torture gulag. It's an extension of the battlefield in a global War on Terror. Stop undermining it.

- Terrorist: apparently, so soon still after 9-11, this word has fallen out of favor with our elite media. They prefer a word that blurs morality a little better, in order that they can make moral relativistic connections between them and us easier. The new term is "insurgent", implying that the daily murderous bombings in Iraq are the work of ordinary people rising up to throw off our illegitimate occupation. Again, that is a worldview of people that despise President Bush, not an accurate news reporting description.

They are not insurgents. It is not the regular citizens of Iraq that are attacking our troops still in Iraq. Those people are going about building hospitals and schools, with our help, and setting up a government and and a constitution. The bombings are being committed by terrorists pouring over the border from Iran and Syria. Islamic terrorists. Some are Al Qaida, in fact. Terrorists, not insurgents. Get it right, already.

- Quagmire: Teddy Kennedy likes to step up to a microphone every other day and declare our efforts in Iraq to be a "quagmire". Saying this constantly does not make it true. It's only been two years since we started this effort, and we're making incredible strides toward building a democracy in a region that was formerly a threat to us. If you are so history challenged that you think that this pahse of the War on Terror is a quagmire, you should take time to reflect on this 4th of July weekend on how long it took our own country to go from the Declaration of Independence to an approved Constitution. 11 years. You could look it up. Or you could just keep listening to Teddy Kennedy and company blather on about quagmire, and undermine our war effort the process. Nice.

- Extremist: The Democrats have promptly labelled every nominee that President Bush has made for appeals court leve judges to be "extremists". Every one. They fought them tooth and nail with fillibusters for 4 years, stepping in front of a microphone every chance they got to call them right-wing extremists. Clearly, a dispassionate review of their records indicate that they are mainstream conservatives. But, thanks to the collaboration of the mostly-Democrats in the media, conservative now equals "right-wing extremist". Or, to say it another way, extremist = not liberal.

- Private property: for more than two hundred years it's been a foundational principal of our country that one of the keystones of liberty is the right to own private property. It's one of the defining elements of freedom. It's your land. Your neighbors can't take it away from you. The rich guy down the street can't get it from you if you don't want to sell. And, especially, government can't take it away from you except in the most compelling circumstances for "public use". We've believed that for two hundred years. Until last week, when a liberal activist Supreme Court drove a truck through the strict meaning of "Public use", completely destroying the meaning of the term. Now, the court ruled, governments can take your private property and give it to another private interest if the public benefits in some way, like higher property tax revenue. It's a serious blow to freedom from tyranny.

I'm telling you folks, these past weeks have not been the "War of the Worlds", but the war of the words. If we don't want to let the left in this country continue to undermine the War on Terrorism and degrade freedom, we have to start calling B.S. on their distortion and destruction of the meaning of some really important words.