More on the story behind the story on the Obama administration's Orwellian word choices. Turns out when I wrote they were boring us to death with deadening language--putting us to sleep, to be sure--I wasn't kidding. In his NRO piece today on the Obama switch from "Global War on Terror" (bad enough, sez I) to Overseas Contingency Operations (beyond garbled),  Andy McCarthy explains what's really going on:

Saul Alinsky, Obama’s community-organizing inspiration, wrote at length about words in Rules for Radicals, about their power to inspire and to enervate. “In communication as in thought, we must ever strive toward simplicity” when it is our purpose to inspire. Such a purpose calls for “a determination not to detour around reality.” An opposite purpose, Alinsky writes, calls for an opposite approach. Avoid the “force, vigor, and simplicity” of the right word, and “we soon become averse to thinking in vigorous, simple, honest terms.” Instead, “We strive to invent sterilized synonyms.” Such “new words,” Alinsky taught, “mean something different, so that they tranquilize us, begin to shepherd our mental processes off the main, conflict-ridden, grimy, and realistic power-paved highway of life.”

Of course! Such tranquilizing and sterilized synonyms abound in our supra- bureacracies designed to entrap and dispirit the individual human soul, from the USG to the EU to the UN. Speaking of the UN, a Fox News report on a diabolical UN plan to use "climate change" to control trillions of dollars from countries such as ours, notes this:

In the stultifying language that is normal for important U.N. conclaves, the negotiators are known as the "Ad Hoc Working Group On Further Commitments For Annex I Parties Under the Kyoto Protocol." Yet the consequences of their negotiations, if enacted, would be nothing short of world-changing.

Whatever it takes, coffee, No-doze, we've got  to stay awake and figure this stuff out. Boring is no excuse--it's a death sentence.