Yesterday I was going to post news headline that underscored the distressing "state of the union"... issues included: Mercury poisoning of the planet, governmental bald faced LIES, egregious behaviors by leaders, horrors of war, etc.

I couldn't understand how all this didn't elicit response and outrage from the mainstream media....

But today, Tom Dispatch, explains a lot with his: Entries for a Devil’s Dictionary of the Bush Era

"For the last few years we have been ruled by lexicographers. Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words."
"The way gunmen once reached for their six-guns, so the various legal and other counselors of this administration reach for their dictionaries. The lawyer-authors of the various tortured memos about torture that came out of the White House Counsel's office and the Justice Department, for instance, expended much effort acting as if they were part of a panel for a new edition of some dictionary.
It seems they sat surrounded by the Webster's New International Dictionary (sometimes the 1935 edition, sometimes later ones), the American Heritage Dictionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary, medical dictionaries, and who knows what else, as they decided just how much pain wasn't actually pain for the benefit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the President. "
"While they consulted piles of dictionaries and other reference materials to draw the pain out of a global torture regime, their true definitional focus was on removing all fetters, all checks and balances, from George W. Bush's power as president."

The article, with links, is worth reading, keeping and remembering...