Tom's Journal

The news today about the “troop withdrawal” plan was real doublespeak.

The presence of troops would be reduced by two units. However, neither of the units is currently in Iraq. One is in Kuwait and will just stay there unless the violence increases. The other is in Kansas and will just stay there, except for some forces who will go to Iraq to train Iraqis. The two units, who were projected to go, are directed not to go, but some of them will go, so the decrease of troops is really an *increase.* So this is their new communication technique: Say you are doing one thing. Espouse the details describing exactly the opposite. But the schools do not teach sentence parsing any more, so most people don’t know how to write a sentence containing multiple ideas, and they won’t understand it anyway.