Chapter VII, Part 1

VII. Discursive Themes of Social Division

VII.A Tracking social discourse

1. In recent decades, the ideological polarisation between right versus left in English-speaking societies (and many others) has been drastically overlaid by the economic polarisation between top versus bottom.¹ If the ideological centre seems to be in remission, so does the economic ‘middle class’. Those politicians on both right and left who align themselves with the top and against the bottom create a hollow ‘new left’ cloning the old right, and a vitriolic ‘new right’ moved over to the far right. The latter are obsessed with money and power, and with an agenda to abolish every trace of the social safety net by their Orwellian term ‘welfare reform’, which would, among other things

[1989] get rid of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, make cuts in Medicaid and turn it into a block grant, cut home heating allowances and food stamps, and deny assistance to welfare moms who can’t find work.²

Apparently, the vaunted ‘compassionate conservatives’ at the top of the world’s richest country want America’s ‘unfortunate’ to be not just poor, but destitute; not just sick, but untreated; not just cold, but freezing; not just hungry, but starving. Not just the ‘survival of the fittest’, but the extinction of the ‘unfit’.

2. Thus intent is chillingly plain in the voting record of the now supposed ‘Vice-President’ Richard Cheney, who when in Congress consistently voted against the civil rights programs, federal immunization program, school lunch and child nutrition programs, support services for the elderly, family violence prevention programs, college student aid programs, adult education, bilingual education, the Equal Rights Amendment, minimum Social Security benefits, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund hazardous waste cleanup program…and (almost alone) even against the bans on armour-piercing cop-killer bullets and on guns that fool metal detectors.³

3.  If Cheney often lost on these spiteful votes, supposed ‘President’ George W. Bush often wins by acting through executive order with no vote.⁴ Just in the first few months ‘in office’, he slashed the budgets of libraries, public housing repairs, child abuse programs, workforce training for the dislocated, renewable energy research, fuel efficient cars, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Community Access Program, the Girls and Boys Club of America, the Childcare and Development Grant — even though, all put together, the money thus ‘saved’ couldn’t make a dent in the trillion-dollar deficits projected from his binges of ‘tax relief’ for the very rich.⁵ And don’t bother ask the ‘President’ why, since he is evidently misled by his title of ‘commander in-chief’ to regard government as a military operation:

[1990] I’m the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being President. […] I don’t feel I owe anyone an explanation. (speaking to the National Security Council)

The rolls of the victims of these cuts by a chest-beating ‘compassionate conservative’ and ‘education president’ were  already long by 2003, just for example: 33,000 in child care programs; 332,000 in home heating programs; 36,000 in meals for minors programs; 8,000 in homeless child education programs; and 50,000 in after-school programs (Bushwhacked).⁶

4. Surely the increasing disproportion between the tiny empowered minority scrambling to the top and the vast disempowered majority slipping toward the bottom is flagrantly incompatible with both the theory and the practice of democracy. Public and private discourse become steadily more conflicted as discursive strategies or themes compete to inform or 'disinform' the population, to legitimise or illegitimise some position or proposal, all of which raises a veritable gamut of social, political, and economic issues for an ecologist study of text and discourse. In this chapter, I shall raise some of these issues and identify and illustrate some strategies of discourse and counter-discourse which inhabit them, reserving for later the in-depth analysis of individual texts.

VII.B  Modes of speaking 1: Strategies for inclusion and exclusion

5. First, we can review some strategies you can use to include or empower yourself, usually excluding or disempowering others, at least by implication. Self-promoting tells how superior you are, as is common in the discourses of public relations such as advertising [1991] and politics [1992].

[1991] We are absolutely the best service available to help fight or beat a speeding ticket […] without you discussing your speed or driving, [by finding] rules, regulations or procedures that ‘they’ have not followed (Ticket Killer)^www

[1992] We are the most environmentally friendly Agriculture Ministry in Europe. (Minis-ter John Gummer, who ate a hamburger and force-fed another to his 4-year old daughter on British TV in 1990 to ‘prove’ that mad cow disease poses no danger to humans)

With everything claiming to be ‘the best’, a special irony inheres in the Collocation ‘nothing but the best’ which returned 74,226 hits from AltaVista on the Internet, glorifying music, dogs, knives, furniture, health care, real estate, football camps…

6. Academic discourses too become self-promoting as they are increasingly colonised by public relations:

[1993] Northface University is establishing the finest university in the world for software developers. […] The courses are fast-paced, utilize leading edge technologies, and reinforce best practice skills. […] Students are mentored by some of the most well-respected thought leaders in the software industry.^www

 [1994] With our reputation as one of the UK’s leading centres of teaching excellence and research innovation, we’re making a lasting impact on the next generation of innovators and business leaders (Sheffield City Polytechnic)⁷

Staff must do their own self-promotion on ‘evaluation forms’ inquiring how we have ‘improved our teaching and research’ since the last evaluation and plan to do before the next (should any time and energy remain after filling out the piles of forms).

7. Patronising seeks power by disempowering others. You can address them as ignorant or stupid [1995]; or you can loftily bestow praise like a special favour [1996].

[1995] You are patronising me […]  far more that any sexist male could. I am a woman with a brain, […] I do not require anyone to decide which bits of books I can manage to read without straining my poor little intellect to the breaking point. (Elizabeth Elliot)^www

[1996] ‘You grow quite professional as a landlady. I hear on all sides of the excellence of your establishment.’ Wilson knew she was being patronised if not mocked outright (Lady’s Maid)

The term originated as a process of social or financial support from a powerful ‘patron’, but the current sense suggests tendering unwanted or irrelevant support.

8. Jargonising seeks power by deploying a strenuous style of gratuitously technical, obscure, or pretentious expressions to empower insiders and disempower outsiders. Legal discourse or ‘legalese’ has been one prime domain, viz.:

[1997] Financial products supplied by a financial supply facilitator are not financial supplies. However, a supply of an interest facilitated by a financial supply facilitator is a financial supply by the financial supply provider if the supply of the interest is one to which regulation 40-13 applies. (Australian Treasurer on the Goods and Services Tax)

[1998] Trial court did not abuse its discretion by ordering a post-judgement temporary injunction to enforce a permanent injunction that was part of a final judgement when the court made adequate findings that the permanent injunction was violated and tailored the post-judgement injunction to only enforce the provisions of the permanent injunction. (Minnesota Court of Appeals in the Minneapolis Star Tribune) ⁸

The jargonising of discourses in statistics can be wondrously theoretical, since they don’t need to directly confront reality or address the public, e.g.:

[1999] Randomization defines the parameter of interest expressed as a function of multiple endogenous variables. It orthogonalizes the treatment variable simultaneously with respect to the other regressors in the model and the disturbance term for the conditional population. (Randomization)^www

Recently, too, the jargon of computer ‘technospeak’ has scaled new depths:

[2000] CGMud is a free, softcoded system with a cached on-disk database and dynamic single inheritance, supporting graphical I/O via a custom client. (CGMud)^www

[2001] The ABC-PDQ 381 environments into hex and alphageomosaic applications virtualized to PIA DIP switch functionality at 1200₁₀ baud. (XERCOM in InfoWorld) 

Unlike the discourses of law or statistics, these are, perversely enough, intended to attract paying clients and customers, who, if they can’t understand them, can at least be too impressed to resist or to ask unwanted questions.

9. The term shoptalk can designate discursive strategies of a professional group to facilitate insider use rather than to impress each other or outsiders. An engaging example stems again from the computer industry, but from the community of ‘hackers’, defined by themselves as persons who ‘program enthusiastically (even obsessively)’, or ‘enjoy exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities’.⁹ (The term should not be confused with the journalistic misuse of ‘hacker’ for the ‘cracker’ who breaks through the computer security codes.) Their shoptalk described in [2002] fits their occupation of manipulating symbol systems as ‘languages’ of the computer.

[2002] Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. [They] regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence.

Shoptalk terms devised to designate people may be Ameliorative for expert hackers [2003-06] or Pejorative for people the hackers unwillingly deal with [2007-10].

[2003] demigod: A hacker with years of experience, a national reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community.

[2004] Jim Clark […] launched Silicon Graphics Inc., whose high-powered computers transformed the way everything from suspension bridges to jet aircraft get designed. […] But a successful Healtheon IPO would put him firmly in the pantheon of high-tech demigods (Business Week)

[2005] language lawyer: A person who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages.

[2006] The C++ Programming Language is excellent reference for language lawyers as well as a good tutorial for newbie [beginner] users (DWM)^www

[2007] code grinder: A suit-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages and other unspeakable horrors.

[2008] Many of the college graduates with Computer Science degrees these days are code grinders with no understanding or enthusiasm for an aesthetic engineering solution. (Perry E. Metzger)^www  

[2009] marketroid: A member of a company’s marketing department who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; or one who describes existing features in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak.

[2010] Marketroids will take any documented file format with more than two users and declare it ‘standard’. 

  (John Foust)^www

Pejorative too are the terms for the practices of jargonising:

[2011] cybercrud: Obfuscatory tech-talk. The computer equivalent of bureaucratese.

[2012] The headaches of junkmail fibercrud pale beside the anxieties triggered by vivid multi-media cybercrud served up on optical disks and communication links. (Paul Saffo)^www

[2013] math-out: A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually content-free.

[2014] The only problemo is both these examples of the Adaptive Vector Quantizer are a math-

    out, and I cannot decipher to layman’s terms the algorithm supplied. (Bryan Reinhardt)^www

Whereas euphemism primly masks the pejorative (like throwing people out of work) (VI.48f), shoptalk playfully mocks the pejorative, partly to poke fun at products that plague the practices of hackers. Puns abound. ‘MS-DOS’ becomes ‘mess-loss’, ‘mess-dog’, ‘mess-dross’, and ‘Domestos’ (the toilet cleaner), because of ‘its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, and its nasty primitive interface’. ‘FORTRAN becomes ‘Fortrash’, because of ‘its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics’. ‘IBM’ is said to stand for ‘Inferior But Marketable, ‘Insidious Black Magic’, or ‘It’s Been Malfunctioning’, for making machines that hackers find ‘underpowered and over-priced’; ‘the designs are incredibly archaic’, and ‘you can’t fix them’ because ‘source code is locked up tight’.

10. These functions set shoptalk clearly apart from the other discourse strategies reviewed above. It promotes solidarity among insiders and deconstructs the power-seeking pretentiousness of patronising and jargonising, which is disdained by hackers as ‘bureaucratic bafflegab’ as well as 'cybercrud'. Though shoptalk does tend to exclude outsiders, its purpose is programmatically inclusive:

[2015] Hacker culture [is] conscious of some important shared experiences, roots, and values; it has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. The special vocabulary of hackers helps hold their culture together — it helps hackers recognize each other’s places in the community. […] A sense of community may be hackerdom’s most valuable intangible asset.⁹

Similarly, the hacker community is undeniably a power group, but they earn their status far more legitimately than some bombastic ‘authority’ who produces discourse like [1997-99]. Their specialised knowledge and experience are products of intense and arduous training, and empower the rest of us who must depend on the electronic industry to minimise the drudgery of producing texts and images, and communicating over vast distances. And they resist intrusive projects like the ‘computer forensic laboratories for seized or intercepted computer evidence’ created by the Patriot Act (VII.109.6.1) or the ‘New American Century’ plan to ‘seize total control of cyberspace and the Internet’ (VII.97).

[2016] There’s nothing that gets people in the high-tech world more excited than Big Brother and the misuse of technology, especially by the federal government. (Wade Randlett at DigitalConsumer)^www

Indeed, hackers may prove to be the prime force of resistance, always devising ingenious means to protect the privacy of citizens and ferret out ‘top secrets’ of governmental and military misconduct.

VII.C  Modes of speaking 2: Strategies for displacement

11. Next, we can review some strategies for saying one thing to avoid saying another that might cause difficulties. Here too, you may be empowering yourself and disempowering others, but less overtly, e.g., making yourself look good just by making others look bad. Since the terms for describing are mostly not stabilised, I shall improvise, mainly by creating brisk analogies to ‘doublespeak’ as publicised by the US National Council of Teachers of English.

12. The term doublespeak itself was coined after Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ plus ‘doublethink’ in the novel 1984, and serendipitously links with ‘doubletalk’: using language to create a misleading and soothing alternative to some straightforward and pejorative reality — like providing a discursive veneer of official theory to mask operational practice. One US survey from law, business, economics, and politics concluded that ‘doublespeak has become the language of public discourse, the language we use to conduct the business of the nation’ (William Lutz).¹⁰

13. In its more extreme modes, doublespeak can be utterly mystifying. The text [2017] on the back of former US ‘draft cards’ seems designed to make sure you won’t know how to ‘appeal’ (and won't), whilst [2018] leaves you dazed about the forces that are (or maybe are not?) menacing ‘enunciatory modality’.

[2017] A personal appearance before the appeal board may be requested if you are eligible to request an appeal to the appeal board.  You may appeal to the appeal board without requesting a personal appearance before the appeal board, but if you wish to appear before the appeal board, you must specifically ask for the appearance in addition to requesting an appeal.

[2018] If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classification can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. (Homi K. Bhabha The Location of Culture)

But often you can make a canny guess, e.g., that [2019-20] are about people dying.

[2019] Patient failed to fulfill his wellness potential. (entry in doctor’s chart after the patient died)

[2020] rocket boosters […] have an explosive force upon surface impact that is sufficient to exceed the accepted overpressure threshold of physiological damage for exposed personnel. (Air Force letter)

14. Unquestionably, doublespeak is a royal strategy of US ‘administrations’ on touchy issues. Bush Sr. pledged ‘no new taxes’ during the 1988 election campaign and for his 1991 budget, which hid $21.7 billion of them behind the locutions ‘receipts proposals’ and ‘user fees’; elsewhere, he spoke of ‘revenue increases’ and ‘passenger facilitation charges’. Under Reagan, tax increases were first ‘revenue enhancement’, then ‘receipts strengthening’; under Clinton, a ‘wage-based premium’. Lunging obsessively in the opposite direction, Bush Jr replaced ‘tax cut’ connoting pain with ‘tax relief’ connoting a cure for pain.

15. Doublespeak has been craftily combined with jargonising (in the sense of VII.8) by coining outlandish technical terms to implicate power and authority whilst camouflaging what is meant. Peace was ‘permanent pre-hostility’, and combat was ‘violence processing’ (Pentagon). Bombs were ‘vertically deployed anti-personnel devices’ (U.S. Army). The invasion of Grenada was a ‘pre-dawn vertical insertion’ (State Department). The narrowly avoided nuclear explosion at Three Mile Island was a ‘spontaneous energetic disassembly’ (Metropolitan Edison). Mercenaries in Nicaragua were ‘unilaterally controlled Latino assets’ (Central Intelligence Agency, hereafter CIA). A bill collector was a ‘persistency specialist’ (Chase Manhattan Bank). Road signs were ‘ground-mounted confirmatory route markers’ (Massachusetts Department of Public Works). Fleas were ‘hematophagous arthropod vectors’ (American Journal of Family Practice).

16. And doublespeak terms positively abound for laying off employees, already sampled as euphemisms back in VI.48, as when corporations issue denials like:

[2021] These are called schedule adjustments, not layoffs. (Stouffer Foods)

[2022] This was not a cutback or a layoff. It was a career-change opportunity. (Clifford of Vermont)

Exquisitely quaint doublespeak for layoffs were a ‘normal payroll adjustment’ (Wal-Mart); a ‘career transition program’ (General Motors); ‘management initiated attrition’ (IBM); ‘negative hiring’ (Peoria, Arizona Police Dept.); ‘release of resources’ (Bank of America); and ‘decruiting’ (Council of Residential Specialists).¹¹

17. Plain language, in contrast, unmasks corporate cynicism, as when John Brink, CEO of Consolidated Freightways, posted a hotline for 17,000 employees to call on Labor Day 2002 [2023], eliciting a neat quip from the Teamsters Union [2024].

[2023] Thank you for dialing in this holiday weekend. I hope you and your family and enjoying your time together. I have some extremely urgent and sad news to share with you today. […] Your employment ends immediately. (Associated Press)

[2024] That’s like telling your wife you’re getting divorced on Valentine’s Day. (Carlos Ramos)

In return, plain language is surely the fitting medium for the real human consequences of layoffs, e.g., after a survey among 63,000 Safeway ‘ex-workers’:

[2025] suicides, attempted suicides, divorces, broken families, whole towns devastated economically, [whereas] executives at the top shared a personal gain of $800 million. (Susan Faludi in the Wall Street Journal)

18. Perhaps bubblespeak would be an apt companion term for unmitigated hot air, a cordial ally of doublespeak. Here, absurdly vacuous or tortuous explanations (official theory) are offered because forthright ones (operational theory) threaten the interests of a speaker or authority. A crass infringement of constitutional rights empowering the ‘Department of Justice’ to monitor communication between prisoners and their attorneys (should any be allowed) was ‘promoting justice’ [2026]. ‘Capital punishment’ honours ‘the sanctity of human life’ [2027]. ‘Patriotic folks’ couldn’t serve in Vietnam because the US military was totally filled by ‘ghetto youths’ out for fast bucks [2028]. ‘Environmental criminals’ are ‘decent people’ [2029]. ‘Toxic’ pollution in the workplace promotes the workers’ ‘health’ [2030].

[2026] Its purpose is to encourage full and frank communication between and their clients and thereby promote broader public interests in the observance of law and administration of justice. (Upjohn County vs. United States)

[2027] Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life. (Orrin Hatch)

[2028] So many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks. (Tom Delay on why he and Dan Quayle avoided military service in Vietnam)

[2029] Environmental crimes are not like organised crime or drugs. There you have bad people doing bad things. With environmental crimes, you have decent people doing bad things. (Deputy Assistant Attorney General Barry Hartman)

[2030] When the Office of Management and Budget blocked […] the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from establishing lower exposure limits for more than 1,000 toxic substances used in industry and agriculture, […] the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ruled that workers will be better off exposed: […] ‘because of intense competition, companies cannot raise their prices to pay for the cost of the new regulations [and] would have to cut wages and jobs, [so] workers would have reduced incomes, thus affecting their health.’ (New York Times)

Never mind that companies are gleefully ‘cutting wages and jobs’ anyhow, whilst ‘regulations’ are in fact being gutted  by the Bush-Men (cf. VII.66f, 72. 80).

19. Bubblespeak rose to historic significance when the ‘Supreme Court’ justified unconstitutionally stopping the vote count and in effect appointing Bush Jr to an illegitimate presidency:

[2031] The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does, in my view, threaten irreparable harm to the petitioner [Bush] and to the country by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election. (Justice Antonin Scalia)¹²

To appreciate the rich irony of the bubblespeak from Scalia — whose own son Gene worked for the law firm representing Bush’s ‘petition’ to the Court — we need merely sample the public discourse showing that precisely ‘votes of questionable legality’ produced Bush’s Florida ‘victory’ by an official margin of 592, viz.:

[2032] Of the 2,490 overseas ballots that ended up being included, […] 344 had no evidence of being cast before election day; 183 were postmarked in the US; 96 lacked witnesses; 169 came from unregistered voters; 5 came after the November 19 deadline; and 19 were cast on two ballots. All these violated Florida law, yet were all counted for Bush. (Michael Moore)¹³

[2033] In Seminole County, the elections supervisor (a Republican) had illegally allowed two GOP operatives to ‘correct’ thousands of pre-printed absentee ballot applications mistakenly showing birth dates instead of the legally-required voter IDs, without [which] the law says the applications are automatically void (John Dee in lumpen magazine)

[2034] In Okaloosa County, the Republican elections supervisor sent out absentee ballots unsolicited in response to change-of-address notifications, a practice that was bizarre and illegal, contributing to an 81%, 8,600 margin in absentee ballots for Bush in that County. (Washington Post)

[2035] In Bay County, which has more registered Democrats than Republicans, a suitcase full of absentee ballots was illegally turned in, contributing to a 9,000-to-3,000 margin in absentee ballots for Bush. (courtroom deposition of GOP operative Michael Leach)

And so on. Even these ‘questionable votes’ were modest compared to the mass of non-votes reported in Britain at the crucial time but not in the major US media.¹⁴

[2036] Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush had ordered county elections officials to erase 57,000 voters from voter rolls, most of them Black, […] on grounds they are felons. […] The company that came up with this rotten little ‘purge’ list has, under threat of suit from the NAACP, confessed that the total purge targeted 94,000 voters — and that, at outside tops, only 3,000 may be illegal voters. (Greg Palast on BuzzFlash)

Again with rich irony, Scalia was right that counting votes that proved Gore had actually won would indeed ‘cast a cloud’ on Bush’s ‘legitimacy’; but then so did the Court’s violation of the core principle of democracy — the right of the citizen to vote and have your vote counted honestly. And, as amply emerges from discourse data I cite, the ‘Bush administration’ is doing more ‘irreparable harm to the country’ than I could have imagined, and so far getting away with it. As we shall see, the ‘White House’ spews forth a relentless torrent of deceitfully worded assaults on constitutional rights, consumer health, worker safety, and the environment. 

20. The combined weight of these voting violations presents a discursive dilemma of what to call Bush Jr, since you can only be ‘president’ if you won the election; you cannot just be appointed by a Supreme Court packed with right-wing allies. Designations like ‘Thief-in-Chief’, ‘a trespasser on federal land, a squatter in the Oval Office’ (Michael Moore), though apt enough, might seem confrontational. For my part, I merely put quotation marks around the titles in his ‘Administration’, whose domination by ‘Justice’ and ‘Defense’ has earned it the designation of  ‘junta’ and its ascension that of a ‘coup d’état’ from various commentators.¹⁵  If such terms sound inapplicable to America, a little-known ‘coup’ was actually planned in 1934 to kill the New Deal and restore the gold standard, as revealed to Congress by Major General Smedley Butler of the US Marine Corps:

[2037] Butler testified that bond trader Gerald MacGuire had approached him in the summer of 1933, claiming to represent wealthy Wall Street broker Grayson Murphy, Singer sewing machine heir Robert Sterling Clark, and other unnamed men of wealth. […] MacGuire asked Butler to lead an army of 500,000 veterans in a march on Washington, D.C. […] Butler eventually deduced that the real goal was a coup d’état to take Roosevelt captive, and force reinstatement of the gold standard. […]. The plotters would keep Roosevelt as a figurehead until he could be ‘encouraged’ to retire.¹⁶

Is it un-American for the president to be a figurehead for tycoons and the military?  (No-brainer of the year.)

21. If such ballot abuses don’t recur in 2004, then it may well be because there aren’t any ballots — only computerised ‘voting machines’ from GOP-friendly companies like Diebold and ES&S, whose potential for election fraud — already a Republican speciality perfected in Florida — is known to be infinitely greater:¹⁷ 

[2038] The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how to record and tally votes are allowed to be held as ‘trade secrets’. […] The companies that make these machines insist that their mechanisms are a proprietary secret. Can citizen’s groups, or even election officials, audit their accuracy? Not at all, with touch screens, and rarely, with optical scans, because most state laws mandate that optical scan paper ballots be run through the machine and then sealed into a box, never to be counted unless there is a court order. (Bev Harris in Scoop)

[2039] Diebold Election Systems had been storing 40,000 of its files on […] an obscure site never revealed to public interest groups, but generally known among election industry insiders, and available to any hacker with a laptop. […] These files amounted to a virtual handbook for vote-tampering: diagrams of remote communications setups, passwords, encryption keys, source code, user manuals, testing protocols, and simulators, as well as files loaded with votes and voting machine software. (same)

Reports of incidents like the following need not seem so ‘weird’ after all (so who needs the Marines?):

[2040] In Alabama, Democrat Don Siegelman won the election for governor and went home. The next morning, 6,300 of his votes were gone, and Republican Bob Riley took the job instead. A recount was requested, but denied. (Vox Populi)^www

[2041] If you pressed the Democrat’s name in some counties in Texas, the Republican’s name was chosen. And in Cormal County, Texas, three Republican candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes apiece. ‘Isn’t that the weirdest thing?’ County Clerk Joy Streater asked at the time. ‘We noticed it right away, but it is just a big coincidence.’ […] But it gets even more amazing: in two other races elsewhere in this great nation, Republicans won by — wait for it — 18,181 votes. (same)^www

[2042] A recent fund-raising letter written by Diebold’s chief executive Walden O’Dell said he is ‘committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year’. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

[2043] There is a complex connection between the companies that make voting software and machines and the GOP, [which] makes sense of some of the most astonishing out-comes of 2002, where vast majorities of black voters voted for anti-black candidates, or where Republican votes skyrocketed and Democratic numbers plummeted, reversing historic trends, or machines tallied more votes than were cast. (Counter-Punch)^www

(That ‘big coincidence’ in [2041] was a gem of bubblespeak too.) So now we can also wonder what to call this ‘Republican Congress’ and its ‘majority leaders’. At all events, ‘machine politics’ has acquired a nasty new meaning.

22. To judge from the Internet, Bush Jr has created his very own idiom — Dubyaspeak, a pungent personal mix of doublespeak and bubblespeak.¹⁸ He vows that the US is the foremost ‘peacekeeper’ despite his two devastating wars (so far); [2044]; or that the power crisis in California was due to insufficient equipment [2045] and not to the machinations of Bush’s pals and sponsors in the energy industry, as confirmed elsewhere [2046].

[2044] Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment.

[2045] The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.

[2046] After deregulation, […] the small coterie of plant owners held California’s power systems hostage. They could name their price and they did: $9,999 per unit of power — 30,000 percent above the old regulated price. [At] Duke Power of North Carolina, its managers simply threw away the spare parts needed to keep the plants running [and] ordered them to shut down a plant during a shortage (Best Democracy)

Like the election fraud itself, dubyaspeak is rarely deconstructed by the conservative mass media, who after all worked their, erm, heads off helping to get him ‘elected’ [2047-48].

[2047] Reporters have to find a way to turn the nincompoop they bashed through the election into something resembling the leader of the free world (David Carr in the New York Times)

[2048] Fox News formally declared Bush the winner [and] other networks ran like lemmings after Fox; […] John Ellis, the man in charge of Fox’s election coverage, [is] a first cousin of George W. and Jeb Bush (Stupid White Men)

23. Fibspeak is public lying for private or political motives.¹⁹

[2049] There is no conclusive evidence that nicotine is addictive; […] and the same thing with cigarettes causing emphysema, lung cancer, heart disease (Rush Limbaugh) [More than 1,000 Americans die each day from smoking-related causes. – LifeClinic.com]

[2050] The US gives far and away more tax money to foreign countries than anyone. (Bill O’Reilly) [The US gives a smaller fraction of its gross national product than any other developed country – Institute for Policy Studies]

[2051] There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived. (Limbaugh)  [Today, less than 2 million can claim ‘Indian’ ancestry; in 1492, it was between 5 and 15 million ­– Bureau of Indian Affairs]

[2052] There are 100,000 abductions of children by strangers every year in the United States. (O’Reilly) [There were 134 in 1999, and 93 in 2000.]

[2053] 800 babies a year are being left in dumpsters in Washington, DC (Newt Gingrich) [Four babies were found in dumpsters that year, all rescued and cared for Newt’s favourite enemy, the Clinton federal government]

[2054] Conceptions from rape occur with the same frequency as snowfall in Miami. (Bush nominee Judge Leon Holmes on denying abortion to rape victims) [Each year in America over 30,000 women become pregnant from rape or incest; snow falls in Miami roughly once ever 100 years – American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology]