Polite Euphemisms and Other Matters...

I'm recovering from the flu today, so I'm going to keep it short.

Glenn Greenwald has a post on Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, and testimony from Attorney General Michael Mukasey. He makes some interesting observations about just how Orwellian things have gotten under this Administration.

Greenwald writes:

The Senators and Mukasey spoke all day long about torture with such dispassion that one would have thought it was nothing more than the latest bureaucratic HUD program. They don't even use the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" any more. That phrase has been so normalized that they now all know and use an abbreviation for it -- "EIT." So Senators ask questions about when "EITs" can be used and the Attorney General outlines the elusive formula he applies to determine its legality and all controversy, all passion, all intensity is completely drained out of the discussion in the U.S. Senate of our torture policies. "Torture" is now an EIT Unit.

Lauri in York