So not only has Rice rebuked Russia's invasion of Georgia, but now "Mad Bomber" McCain has declared that invading other countries is just so passé ...never mind the little invading of Iraq thing...
I think Humpty Dumpty explained this best in Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking Glass:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
See, apparently, when the US invades other countries, that's not really an "invasion" in the classical meaning of the term. No, its something else.
Similarly, when the US tortures people, that's not really technically "torture" either.
Oh, and "meddling" in Iraq is only something that Iran does.
When bombs are dropped on civilians? "Collateral damage".
Armed British Marines who are taken into custody while illegally entering into Iranian territorial waters? Not "detainees" but hostages.
The involuntary residents of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Diego Garcia and all the other "black site" prisons aren't really "prisoners of war", nor are they civilians and not even humans subject to the Geneva Conventions...no, they're something we just made up: "illegal combatants".
Rounding up millions of Palestinians, depriving them of their property, and shoving them into ghettos isn't ethnic cleansing...no, its just "transfer" of "absentee landowners."
But Orwell said it too:
Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
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