Gene Healy on Drone-War Doublethink

"Political language," George Orwell wrote in 1946, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." When government action can only be defended by arguments "too brutal for most people to face," governments reliably brutalize the language, resorting to "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

The Obama team has lately added a new term to the doublespeak lexicon, "the disposition matrix." This soporific word-cloud replaces the admirably frank "kill or capture list," writes Gene Healy.