Doublespeak

So yesterday afternoon I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, and flipping through the news. I came upon a story on yahoo about a speech that Donald “I am Satan” Rumsfeld had given the night before. Upon reading the story, I left my body. I simply had to, because the earth had started turning the wrong way and everything was suddenly upside down. I felt really floaty, and not in a nice way.

In his speech, Rumsfeld accused critics of the administration - opponents of the war in Iraq, liberty activists, people that are fond of our Constitution and want to preserve it – of supporting fascism. Those of us who are not with the “president” are foolishly trying to appease the Nazis of the 21st century. We are silly and we have been misled. We are suffering from a “kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong.”

I am having another out-of-body experience.

I did not hear or read Rumsfeld’s entire speech, but the bits I did see were pure examples of doublespeak.

It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies, when those who warned about a coming crisis -- the rise of fascism and Nazism -- they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War Two, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else's problem.

...some seem not to have learned history's lessons.

The irony nearly killed me.