The word “terrorist” seems to be creeping into the media and certain legislatures to denote anything that makes people feel uncomfortable.
The tokenization of this word is rather disturbing to me. Terrorism, while always ghastly, comes in varying degrees of horror. There are individual terrorists, there are tightly politically controlled terrorists, there are global terrorists, there are anarchic terrorists. And, nasty though it seems, some terrorists are worse than others.
But the word seems to have lost any nuance. Indeed in many cases it has become a brush with which to tar not only the real perpetrators of terrorism, but anyway with whom one disagrees. It’s like McCarthy and his splattergun of “Communist! Communist!”.
What kind of newspeak is this? Can someone please tell me how this frankly scary individual Perle has become so influential in the US administration? I know he’s a big mouth at Project for the New American Century. Is that why? How much influcence does a fucksock like this actually have over the Prez?
jjimm: He couldn’t call him a Communist because it’s too old hat. Un-American, while still pretty popular, has a somewhat retro feel. Terrorist is still nice and shiny , it’s so New Millenium.
Kal the starnge thing is some people would take what you said to me as an insult
As for that prick Perle he’s on Newsnight almost every second night and turms up on lots of other news progs on UK TV. Hell he was even spouting his bile about the UN on Primetime on Irish RTE the other night. If he’s not that important he sure gives the impression he is.
I agree with you, jjimm that it’s inappropriate to call Hersh a terrorist. Even if Hersh were a bad journalist (he’s a very good one IMHO), he wouldn’t be a terrorist.
However, I think your calling Perle “frankly scary” is a step in the same direction…
By whatever mechanism he chooses to influence the current adminstration, he does appear to have the president’s ear. And someone with that much influence and these views, I do find scary.
december, when a private businessman, appointed to a position by a member of government has the ability to advise the government for his own financial gain, thats scary.
It seems like Catch-22. Most of us want the government to have access to advice from knowledgable private individuals. But, their field of expertise is normally the field in which they work. So their advice has the potential to provide for their own financial gain.
Note that the same sort of potential conflict could arise whether the advisor was a businessman, a union leader, an artist, a doctor, etc. You call it “scary.” I call it “unavoidable.”
