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Truth etc
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side," George Orwell once wrote. "He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
So it is on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, where the occupying powers are still so desperate to create a moral framework to justify the war that embracing the irrelevant and ignoring the inconvenient has become the only viable strategy left to them.
We have entered a world where reality - like the photographs of torture or the absence of weapons of mass destruction - is just a minor blockage in a flood of official, upbeat declarations and statements. Each new dispatch from the departments of irony on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that truth can be created by assertion, principle can be established by deception and democracy can be imposed through aggression. These people would claim credit for the good weather and deny responsibility for their own signature if they thought they could get away with it.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1442261,00.html
I don't think this tendency in political speech is limited to the different sides of the Atlantic. We do quite a good job of it here. Political interviews are barely interviews these days - it looks like all the pollies must have bad hearing for the relevance their answers have to tricky questions.
Howdy, Stranger!