Obama is a rail-splitter, buffoon and boor

Nutmeg dealer.

No wait, he's a cross between sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.

A few days ago, Obama lamented that, “Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

John Miller looked it up and reports:

After securing the Republican nomination in 1860, he was branded the “Black Republican.” Southern newspapers obsessed over his physical appearance. He was “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a human frame” and “a horrid looking wretch . . . sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man.”

Following Lincoln’s inauguration, the Charleston Mercury dubbed the new president “the Ourang-Outang at the White House.” Others called him “the Illinois Ape,” a “Baboon,” and “the original gorilla.” A Virginia congressman called him “a cross between sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.”

Of course it all calmed down eventually.

Many of Lincoln’s critics were in the North. As the 1864 election approached, the New York World condemned the GOP ticket of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson: “The age of statesmen is gone; the age of rail-splitters and tailors, of buffoons, boors and fanatics, has succeeded,” it wrote. “In a crisis of the most appalling magnitude, requiring statesmanship of the highest order, the country is asked to consider the claims of two ignorant, boorish, third-rate backwoods lawyers, for the highest stations in government."

If you don't like this post, then you're a “border ruffian” and “a vulgar mobocrat.” Bite me.

Surrounded by newspeak

Roger Kimball writes:

When I wrote about what Obama’s minions are calling our “kinetic military activity” in Libya, I noted that the folks presiding over Orwell’s Newspeak would have liked the phrase “kinetic military activity.” As a mendacious and evasive euphemism for “war” it is hard to beat. But Orwell is not the only important thinker the Obama administration’s assault on the English language brings to mind. There is also Confucius. 

Asked by a disciple how to rule a state properly, Confucius replies that it begins with rectifying the names: 

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.”

That was written about 475 B.C. When will we catch up with its wisdom?

Uh, when the teleprompter breaks?

Surrounded by newspeak

Roger Kimball writes:

When I wrote about what Obama’s minions are calling our “kinetic military activity” in Libya, I noted that the folks presiding over Orwell’s Newspeak would have liked the phrase “kinetic military activity.” As a mendacious and evasive euphemism for “war” it is hard to beat. But Orwell is not the only important thinker the Obama administration’s assault on the English language brings to mind. There is also Confucius. 

Asked by a disciple how to rule a state properly, Confucius replies that it begins with rectifying the names: 

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.”

That was written about 475 B.C. When will we catch up with its wisdom?

Uh, when the teleprompter breaks?

A word for Washington

Just when you think we've run out of words to describe the politicians in Washington, along comes:

trumpery / trump-êr-ee / noun

1. (Obsolete) Deception, fraud, or trickery.
2. Rubbish, junk.  
3. Flashy but trashy finery in the home or on the body.

Does it get any better than this?

Dr. Goodword gives the history: The original meaning of this word, "deception", is now a bit dated and less frequently used but it explains how the word got into English. It was originally French tromper "to cheat, swindle, deceive". Once it entered English, though, as you can see, its meaning eventually dwindled to "nonsense". The similarity of this word to (to) trumpet explains its gravitation toward the sense of "trashy finery". Trumpery is unrelated to the trumping that goes on in many card games; that trump is an old mispronunciation of triumph!

Do campaign slogans change the way you think?

The Economist's excellent language blog, Johnson (named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson), notes how the term "pro-choice" came into being and looks into other political uses of language.

NPR has an interview with Linda Greenhouse, the author of a book on the debate that led up to the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling. She explains how the phrase "right to choose" (later "pro-choice") was coined by a pro-abortion campaigner:

...she wrote a memorandum framing the issue of how the pro-repeal position should be described: "Right to life is short, catchy, composed of monosyllabic words—an important consideration in English. We need something comparable. Right to choose would seem to do the job. And ... choice has to do with action, and it's action that we're concerned with."

Being "pro" something is of course preferable to being "anti". Nobody wants to sound negative. Plus, it puts the other side at a disadvantage. Being "pro-life" makes your opponents out to be pro-death. So "pro-choice" was a smart counter-move at a time when women's rights were the big issue of social change: it diverted attention from the life/death dichotomy by recasting it as something else.

The writer then notes other uses of this technique: the pro-Israel lobby, for example, and adds:

Given the tendency for the sharpest controversies to settle into this kind of stark framing, it's a bit of a surprise that it hasn't happened for two of the biggest ones: creationism and global warming. Anti-creationists often call themselves "pro-science", but their adversaries have not chosen a pro-position—perhaps because you don't need anything so trivial as a catchphrase when God is on your side.

As for environmentalists, they would obviously be "pro-planet", but the sceptics are evidently struggling to come up with an alternative. Pro-warmth? Pro-carbon? Pro-weather? You can see the difficulty. The closest thing I've been able to find is an argument that it's possible to be both "pro-profit" and "pro-planet". And if you're worried about warming but can't be bothered to reduce your emissions you could always go pro-albedo.

It's useful to keep this in mind, because it happens all the time. as in the Obama administration's refusal to use the words "islam," "Islamist" and "Islamic" in talking about the war on terror.