This is why it is so difficult to judge whether claims of success in reducing the deficit are true. The "defintions" section of anything our politicians say is so out of synch with what mere mortals assume words mean that we can't really trust their words.
There's a reason why there is an old joke that asks how you can tell a politician is lying? (Answer: his lips are moving.) The tendency is old, but with the vast amounts of money they now spend, the consequences have gone from being a good joke to being a joke on all of us.
I don't want to reform Washington, D.C. I want the scope of its powers reduced so that we don't need people of higher quality than we get to make sure they don't screw things up on a scale that can lead to national ruin.
UPDATE: A quick reminder that our politicians can say worse things. Sigh. Remember when dissent was patriotic? Heck, some of those bumper stickers haven't even started to fade yet.
UPDATE: Oh, Jonah has a simple plea of "to Hell with You People" for all the left wing media that fell over themselves with preposterous attacks on Tea Partiers and their setting aside of civility concerns as Democrats slammed Tea Partiers as every sort of foul creature attempting to destroy our fine and decent country.
Yes indeed, to Hell with them.
UPDATE: And more (tip to Instapundit). I guess that defense of dissent went out the window when liberal spending and taxing orthodoxy was under assault.
Oh, and there is a bonus slam on Tom Friedman, whose love of dictatorial actions is entirely reliant on whether they are "reasonably enlightened." He joins the bandwagon of incivility because he doesn't like it that Tea Party members of Congress forced a budget deal over the debt limit leverage (like Congress never uses "riders" to get things they want in bills they must have). Says the article about Friedman:
This is why we envy Friedman. We've occasionally tried to write as badly as he does, and we just can't do it. Yet he makes it seem effortless. Granted, we'd rather be good at writing well--and we are--but why can't we be good at writing badly too?
Heh. Yep. I'm not saying you can't drown in a pool of Friedman's wisdom. But you would have to be drunk and face down.
UPDATE: Ok, let this be my last shot on this issue (for a while):
If liberals believe anything, it is that the right is either solely, or mostly, responsible for the degradation of political discourse in America. And they are surely correct to condemn such ugly rhetorical excesses as the Obama-is-Hitler placards that flowered across the land in the summer of 2009.
But liberals are in deep, deep denial about their own incivility issues.
Do read it all (with a bonus slam on Friedman!). Liberals engage in talk that if even approached by those on the right leads to outraged condemnation by liberals and the press (but I repeat myself). The last couple years make this all too clear. But let's not forget the Bush years when no vulgar insult was too low for our left wing to sink to. It's like Bush Derangement Syndrome symptoms didn't count because Bush, you know, was asking for it. It was his fault.
Liberal cries for "civility" have always been about shutting the right up, as a tactic to defend the liberal status quo of spending and taxing policies. If it was really a "civility" issue, liberals would speak a whole lot differently.
I know this post seems to have diverged from the original, but it is all the same issue, really. Bush "lied" about WMD in Iraq despite sharing that conviction with Democratic leaders and all the world's intelligence services. Being wrong was equated with lying then; while today for the other party, saying something you know isn't true because you've defined the ordinary meaning of words into mush is merely politics.
So it's all the same thing. Different rules for different sides. Mental gymnastics aren't the transformation we were promised.
