Listening to Public Radio this morning, I heard Michael Feldman put out the line that George Bush had announced his new program “No child left insured” and I had to pull my car over to the side of the road I was laughing so hard.
Like most humor, it was designed to cover real pain. By changing a few words, a Bushism was applied to a Bush reality.
It made me think of how Bush has used words to “redefine” so many things that used to be construed as bad, and are now seen as normal. Take the definition of “torture”, for instance. We know now that Bush had Gonzalez come up with new legal definitions for ways of questioning those captured or arrested which, although once considered torture (waterboarding, forced no-sleep in uncomfortable positions, lack of protective clothing in all temperature conditions, etc.), could now be seen as “OK by me” methods of questioning. This lets Bush sit and say “Americans do not torture” on television with the honest smirk on his face he used when commenting on capital punishment victims in Texas (“Don’t kill me, don’t kill me, heh heh”.)
Or how he used words like “We’re here to help you” to Katrina flood victims the one or two times he’s visited New Orleans in the last couple of years… which means “we’re here to help you stay out of the ninth ward, now that you’ve left.”
Words that say one thing but mean their polar opposite have defined the Bush Administration since the beginning… and it doesn’t look like anything will change, right up to the end.