A New Lexicon of Liberal Lies

Periodically someone decodes Liberalspeak—the AmericanThinker had a particularly good one back in 2009, and Tom Sowell updates his periodically—but the British conservative Daniel Hannan has a new one out in the current issue of The New Criterion that is worth taking in.  Here are couple of samples:

DIVERSITY: People who look different but think the same way. Diversity applies to race, sex, disability, and sexual orientation. It emphatically does not apply to opinion. Indeed, when it comes to political views, it has taken on more or less the opposite of its Oldspeak meaning.

GREED: Wanting to keep your own money.

NEED: Wanting to be given someone else’s.

COMPASSION: A politician arranging the transfer.

FAIRNESS: State-enforced equality. It absolutely doesn’t mean reciprocity, proportionate reward, or just deserts.

INVESTMENT: Government spending. Any lingering trace of the original meaning—that is, of assets producing some kind of return—was obliterated by the spending splurge that preceded the 2008 crash. The beauty of the word, from the Left’s point of view, is its flexibility. Almost any financial settlement can be described as “underinvestment,” in the sense of being a smaller settlement than someone, somewhere would ideally have liked.

Worth reading the whole thing. (And subscribing to The New Criterion.)

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