What's the first thing you would do if you ran the country, they asked Confucius.
"Rectify the names," he replied.
They suggested he was joking. Confucius said he wasn't. There is no way to provide good government, he explained, if we do not all agree on what words mean.
That is paraphrased from the Analects of Confucius, translated by Simon Leys. It jumped out at me because it's so (George) Orwellian.
And so true.
Consider yesterday's Albuquerque Journal editorial page. William F. Buckley's column is all about the conservative (or paleo-conservative, as they now say) critique of the Bush war in Iraq.
Near Buckley's column is a Journal editorial on Sen. Kerry's choice of John Edwards for VP. Near the end, it says:
"The Kerry/Edwards ticket draws a clear distinction betweren the decidedly liberal leanings of the Democrats and the conservative course set by the Bush Administration."
Oh, the Bush Administration is "conservative"? How so?
As Buckley points out, its foreign policy certainly isn't.
Domestic policy? Since when did wildly unbalanced budgets become "conservative"? Huge deficits? The centralization of police power in Washington, so egregious that the (conservative) Supreme Court just told the White House to quit it.
The Journal editorialists are intelligent folk, but oh-so-careless with language.
We really do need to rectify the names.
PS (Buckley's column is another proof of the big split on the Right between the old conservatives and the neo-conservatives who foisted the Iraq war on the nation. But the press has been very slow to write story.)