I have this thesis that I've discussed with a few folks. It's not fully developed, but it goes like this: When I was in high school, we read Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell. We KNEW these were about the USSR and when the US "won" the Cold War, I for one, put them in the irrelevant bin. I've been reconsidering that for the last 5 years or so and recently, Al Gore's book, The Assault on Reason, has me coming back to this thesis about the manipulation of language, particularly the manipulation of language to gain political advantage. One of these days I'll write this all down, but here's an observation "torn from today's headlines" (OK really from last week's):
Two years ago, when something stalled in the United States Senate because of the supermajority vote required to end debate in that house (AKA cloture), it was said that the minority was threatening a filibuster! Last week, however, when the Senate couldn't limit debate on the Immigration Bill, the Senate was unable to obtain cloture. OK, class, which phrase is more loaded? Am I the only Winston Smith here, or have others noticed this too? This is doubleplusungood...
By the way, we haven't had a good actual filibuster in decades meaning that the leaders no longer require a member to continuously speak/debate to keep debate "open." These days when a cloture vote fails, the legislation is usually "removed from the floor."
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