Musings on Political Doublespeak

It is somewhat interesting if endlessly repetitive to listen to political talking heads during the presidential contest season in the US. Why? Because nothing shows so clearly how apologetic and polemical bullshit is spun into potential pied piper electoral gold than discourse during the American presidential election season.

A few examples:
Exhibit A: The apologists and polemicists of the corporate Democratic establishment and Hillary Clinton are furiously spinning bullshit that it is dangerous for a foreign power, in this case Russia, which has been demonised in the US at least since WWI, to get hold of the emails Clinton "carelessly" posted on a private server while she was secretary of state. As anyone with half an empirical brain should recognise, however, if the emails are dangerous in the hands of the Russians then Clinton was probably more than "careless" in the way she handled them. She has perhaps put top secret information in harms way. Most people, because their reality is a product of ideology rather than empirical fact will not recognise the inherent contradiction here nor the attempt to deflect the issue from Clinton's handling of the emails to the ideologically constructed one of what would happen if the evil Russkies got their hands on the emails.

Exhibit B: Former attorney general Eric Holder was on Charlie Rose (PBS) just before Clinton gave what most pundits are calling the biggest speech of her career. When pushed on Clinton's "careless" handling of her emails while secretary of state Holder claimed that Clinton made a mistake just like Lincoln did when he did away with habeas corpus during the Civil War. Putting aside the fact that Democrat Holder probably used Lincoln as an example because he was a Republican and putting aside the fact that Rose pulled his punches or had no punches to pull and did not challenge him on the validity of the analogy, a dispassionate observer might wonder whether the Republican/Democrat/Bush/Obama/Clinton expansion of the security state after 9/11 was and is a "mistake". If not then one must ask whether doing away with habeas corpus during the Civil War was not a mistake either.

I could, of course, go on analysing the doublespeak. We could explore how a rigged Democratic primary system became a stirring victory for Hillary Clinton. We could explore how a party that became fully corporatist in the wake of the Reagan victory continues to convince people that it cares about more than the 1% despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. We could explore how limited presidential power is given the checks and balances in American political culture and explore the question of why so many apologists and polemicists and the media continue to talk as though any president can and will put his or her policies into effect all across the US when he or she enters office. We could explore how symbolism--the breaking of the glass ceiling, for instance--seems to be more important to people than policy realities. I think, however, that I will stop here for the moment.