Truth, information, whatever

There was an unintentionally revealing correction on the Wall Street Journal's online editorial page OpinionJournal (James Taranto) yesterday:

The agency in charge of rewriting history in Orwell's "1984" was the Ministry of Truth, not Information. We got it wrong in an item yesterday.

Indeed, it's tough to keep track of matters Orwellian when one needs to devote so much attention to using Official Vast Right Wing [VRC] Conspiracy Approved words onself. Today's examples:

kerfuffle: used to minimize the importance of something, and therefore applied to things like the 16 dodgy words in the State of the Union, the outing of Valerie Plame, and now the controversy over Gregg Easterbrook's comments about Disney executives and Kill Bill.

semantic: applied in contexts where the issue is clearly not just semantics e.g. whether the bill just passed by Congress actually bans "partial birth abortion." The latest resurgence of this line of argument seems to have originated with the aforementioned Easterbook and holds that whatever Congress thinks it banned is obviously evil and people are just arguing about what the name of it is. And note the slimy insinuation of their concluding sentences:

So the question remains: If only critics and foes call it "partial-birth abortion," what do advocates and enthusiasts call it? One suspects they would simply rather not talk about it.

A question which clearly outs them as advocates and enthusiasts for killing mothers when there are pregancy complications. Their logic, not ours.*

Unraveling : A word reserved by the VRC for attacks on Paul Krugman, drawn from the title of Krugman's best selling demolition of Dubya's lunacy. The word has now appeared in two consecutive attacks by OJ on Krugman, and was also deployed by fellow reactionary neocon hack Instapundit yesterday. By the way, their latest line of attack on Krugman is essentially amounting to saying he is anti-Semetic, basically because he has sometimes referred to the role of George Soros in various currency crises of the 1990s. In which case just about the entire field of international exchange rate analysis has been declared anti-Semetic.

Pro-American: reactionary necon hacks, like OJ and Instapundit. Hence:

Pro-terror hackers have been waging a series of "denial of service" attacks on various pro-American blogs including InstaPundit, Little Green Footballs and Tim Blair.

We'll know we're doomed when they start changing the word nuclear to nucular.

*Update: Two good and sobering articles from Slate on the "partial birth abortion" issue. A doctor writes about the already difficult and tragic situations further complicated by this ban, and a related article notes the profound abuse of language contained within the supposed object of the ban.