Friday June 25, 2004

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS. Values scold Daniel Henninger thinks the recent rash of beheadings in Saudi Arabia "pose a political problem for John Kerry" because Bush calls the beheaders "evil" at every (media) opportunity, whereas the lily-livered Purple Heart awardee Kerry speaks only of ways to bring peace, and thereby fewer beheadings, to the area, which is apparently neither the manly nor the American way to do things:

Conservatives do believe in evil, and liberals either no longer do or they don't wish to allow the idea of evil to be explicit in our politics. I would guess that Mr. Hertzberg's view is shared by most of the people working on John Kerry's campaign. They would never ask Mr. Kerry to say in public that the beheadings are "evil." Or if he did, it would be merely as a tactical concession for the moment to the "moral vocabulary" of the world inhabited by the sort of people who support George Bush.

If only Jimmy Carter had thought of this in 1980! In the midst of the hostage crisis, he could have been trained to clench his fists and roar, in the manner of Donald Pleasance in the first "Halloween" movie, that the Ayatollah Khomeni was "toe-tally eee-vil!" Then the American people might have thought: well, he sure has made a mess of things, but at least he speaks our moral vocabulary!

"Moral vocabulary" seems in this usage to be the equivalent of "paternoster" or "mumbo-jumbo": words meant to chase away fear in the teeth of disaster. Might Henninger have written "marketing vocabulary," and been mistranscribed?
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