Essay — November / December 2007

The Limits of Clear Language

Orwell worried about polluted language, but polluted information is more toxic

By Nicholas Lemann  

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Can there be a political writer who has not fallen in love with George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”? Part of its appeal is what’s appealing about all of Orwell—its directness and honesty, its plainspokenness, its faith, against all evidence, that human affairs can be conducted morally, its sense of being on the side of ordinary people, not of the sophisticated and powerful. The only people Orwell attacks by name in “Politics and the English Language” are two celebrated academics, Harold Laski and Lancelot Hogben, not the kind of minor-grade politicians and bureaucrats who would have made easy targets.

“Politics and the English Language” begins as a lesson, and quite a good one, in how to write well (delivered in the form of an attack on people who write badly), and ends with the hope that better writing can engender a better society. What idea could be more attractive to writers than that what we do, if improved along the lines Orwell suggests, can improve not just our readers’ experience of our work, but the lives of everybody? To Orwell, the connection between the English language and politics was that the debasement of the latter requires the corruption of the former. “In our age,” he wrote—meaning, the age of the rise of totalitarianism—“there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.” But saying this generates the hope—highly qualified, as hope always was in Orwell’s work—that better, clearer language could rob bad politics of its voice, and thereby might bring it to an end.

Orwell began work on his masterpiece, 1984, not long after “Politics and the English Language” was published (the essay owes some of its resonance to the way it foreshadows Newspeak, the great literary device Orwell invented for the novel). Although “Politics and the English Language” is probably the best known of all Orwell’s essays, at the time he wrote it—for Horizon, a magazine edited by his old schoolmate Cyril Connolly—he was an extremely busy freelancer. The essay was one of more than a hundred pieces Orwell published in 1946. Even as it advocates care and precision in the use of language, it is more passionate than systematic.

To produce 1984, on the other hand, Orwell, by then a dying man, removed himself to a location about as far from the setting of the book as one can imagine: a house on the sea, at the end of miles of unpaved road, on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Newspeak is a fully worked-out system, far more horrifying than the examples Orwell gives us in “Politics and the English Language.” Its aim is to make individual, independent thought impossible by depriving the mind of the words necessary to form ideas other than those fed to it by the state. Newspeak at once radically limits and shortens the number of words available to people (so that everyone has to operate at the linguistic level of a three- or four-year-old) and turns all words denoting concepts into long, incomprehensible, bureaucratized euphemisms, devoid of meaning and unable to provoke debate or resistance. Take away words, and you have taken away mental function; take away mental function, and you have taken away the possibility of political action.

Because Newspeak is an aspect of a fully realized work of art, it has the quality of seamless, self-contained perfection that art often has: it exists literarily on terms that make it powerful and inarguable. “Politics and the English Language,” because it is farther from perfection, is more interesting to think about today. Its conceptual roughness makes possible a real consideration of Orwell’s proposition that bad language always produces bad politics (and good language can produce good politics) in a way that Newspeak does not.

The primary villain in “Politics and the English Language” is the kind of fancy, pretentious, imprecise prose that is usually purveyed by intellectuals (Orwell’s particular targets were intellectuals on the left), not the state. Nobody who has read the essay can ever use a formulation such as “not unlike” again with a clear conscience. Throughout the essay, Orwell wanders into what seems to be a blanket condemnation of all use of abstractions in political discussion. Life without “democracy,” “justice,” “science,” “class,” and “equality” is a lot more difficult to contemplate happily than life without “not unlike”—these are not, after all, terms purposely made incomprehensible in the manner of Newspeak.

Although Orwell’s language is wonderfully clear, his thought, on this crucial point, is not. Sometimes he seems to be saying that his despair about virtually all political discussion is an artifact of a bad historical moment—which would mean there is hope. But in concluding, he writes, “Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” That sounds pretty hopeless. Orwell is so uncomfortable with big, complex societies that it’s hard to tell whether he would ever approve of political writing that seeks to make observations conceptual, rather than concrete and specific. Bad writing is, unfortunately, eternal; surely there is even more of it today, by weight, than there was in 1946. As a writing guide, “Politics and the English Language” is, more than sixty years after publication, absolutely useful. Whether Orwell’s idea—that better writing, and clearer language, can actually improve politics—applies today is a tougher question.

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Comments

kweberlit

Thu 8 Nov 2007 05:30 PM

Fine essay. Your concluding point, that the falsification of information is at least as dangerous as the corruption of language, was of course anticipated by Orwell, most memorably in 1984, where his hero Winston Smith is employed in routinely rewriting newspapers, government archives, and other documents to make "history" fit the latest propaganda line.

padikiller

Thu 8 Nov 2007 05:41 PM

Nick Leman Wrote "Bush was responding to a successful terrorist attack by declaring war, not against the attackers themselves but against unspecified “enemies of freedom.” padikiller scratches his head as Orwell spins in the grave "Unspecified"?!

Let's keep the Reality Train on the tracks here!...

Would these supposedly "unspecified enemies of freedom" to which President Bush referred in September of 2001 perhaps have been...Al-Quaida?!... (you remember, the international terrorist organization that planned and executed the 9/11 attacks?... Ever heard of them?...)

Or maybe the Taliban? (Remember?... The unenlightened, misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant, Islamofascist regime that harbored and sheltered Al-Quaida in Afghanistan?)...

You think just maybe you can remember somebody or another "specifying" these people when it came time to identifying the "enemies of freedom" in the days after 9/11?!...How much more "specified" can an "enemy of freedom" possibly be, for crying out loud?

AhmNee

Tue 13 Nov 2007 03:38 PM

So ... which of those were we fighting when we invaded Iraq? There was a connection from Saddam Hussein's regime to neither al-Qaeda nor the Taliban.

By all accounts the war in Iraq has left us less safe and has been detrimental to national security. By all accounts we're on the verge of losing any gains in Afghanistan. You know ... the place that does have ties to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. If only we spent a half a trillion dollars fighting the people that actually attacked us ... if only.

padikiller

Tue 13 Nov 2007 09:12 PM

Dude...

Read first, THEN post, OK?...

Look at the dates...

On September 20, 2001 (more than TWO YEARS before we began the incredibly succesful liberation of Iraq from Saddam) NOBODY was talking about Iraq...

That's just the REALITY here...

Let's take the debate up an intellectual notch on your end, shall we?

Ignorance is Blix.... (So to speak)

AhmNee

Wed 14 Nov 2007 05:35 PM

It doesn't change the point. The administration has stomped upon civil liberties, bullied legislative and judiciary branches of government, consolidated and then abused it's powers to an unprecedented extent. All in the name of a war on the invisible bogeyman of terrorism.

A war that's impossible to quantify because there's no way to accurately identify the enemy. If the administration ever got serious about defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the war wouldn't end there because there are plenty of other terrorist groups hiding just around the corner. The war on terror is nothing more than a platform for fear mongering. If it was anything but, we'd have spent a half a trillion dollars securing our ports, airtraffic and domestic defence infrastructure. Not playing in the sand because we like the pretty oilfields.

If it were anything but, Bush would never EVER have tried to defend the enitre DPW port oversight fiasco. What a crock.

If it were anything but, our focus would have been on getting the terrorist that actually attacked America and not gone after Iraq on some obscure agenda of the administration.

If it were anything but, the actions of the administration would match it's rhetoric.

padikiller

Wed 14 Nov 2007 08:07 PM

AhmNee Drones

It doesn't change the point...

padikiller scoffs

Like Hell it doesn't!...

The point of Nick Lemann's post was that President Bush named "unspecified" people as the "enemies of freedom" who attacked America on 9/11...

This point is just silly...

President Bush's comments on 9/20/07 have NOTHING to do with Iraq... And the "enemies of freedom" were very much "specified"... President Clinton lobbed Tomahawks at them... Remember?....

Once again... This just the R-E-A-L-I-T-Y here... Deal with it...

Or don't....

Either way, it's not going anywhere, Dude...

padikiller

Wed 14 Nov 2007 08:11 PM

AhmNee Lets Slip An Inconvenient Truth

"...there are plenty of other terrorist groups hiding just around the corner..."

padikiller responds

Thus, the war!...

Welcome to Realityville... We hope you enjoy your stay!...

AhmNee

Fri 16 Nov 2007 04:58 PM

The point is that the administration has used the 9-11 aftermath to scare the American people with the invisible bogeyman of terrorism. It's been used as carte blanche to bully the other two branches of government, justify the administration's abuse of power, destroy civil liberties and spy on the American people.

That there are plenty of terrorist groups out there isn't an inconvenient truth Padikins, just a universal one. For one man's terrorist is another's revolutionary, or did you forget about things like the Boston Tea Party.

According to the Official FBI definition of terrorism, the American patriots. Our revolutionary forefathers were terrorists. Take a peek:

"Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

Until there's a more civilized method to air grievance and be heard ... terrorist will exist. The war on terrorism is just another endless war. It would make sense if it meant we were taking steps to secure ourselves from another attack ... unfortunately, it hasn't. We're in as bad if not a worse position than we were before 9-11.

padikiller

Fri 16 Nov 2007 06:50 PM

AhmNee Spews Some Nonsense The point is that the administration has used the 9-11 aftermath to scare the American people with the invisible bogeyman of terrorism. padikiller responds "The point" is what?.... You are blithering here about your point, here, not Nick Lemann's..... Your position is as clear as it is ludcirous... There are no "terrorists" in the world except for the baby-killing, blood-thirsty, jackbooted American warmongers on the Halliburton payroll... All the other head-lopping, homosexual-killing, women-oppressing, intolerant people of the world are "freedom fighters" just like Paul Revere... Our silly fear of these "invisible boogeymen" are completely unjustified... Funny.... I remember watching the smoke pour out of the Pentagon from my office window... It seemed utterly "visible" at the time.... There is no point debating with such silly moonbat tripe.. It is just pure stupidity.

AhmNee

Sun 18 Nov 2007 07:53 PM

Countdown to when Padikins babbles incoherent gibberish because he can't think of a real argument ... oh ... we just passed it.

The point is vague and misleading language. We were attacked by al-Qaeda. But war was not declared on al-Qaeda, it was declared on terrorism. If war would have been declared on al-Qaeda, we'd have been focused in Afghanistan and on finding Osama Bin Laden and cutting off the head and funding of their operations. Be we aren't. Progress that the US and UN have made in Afghanistan is failing and the Taliban is regaining it's hold on the country. While our forces were busy with Iraq, a country that had no connection with al-Qaeda and was of no threat to our national security, Osama Bin Ladin has escaped and is still free to plot ways to damage our country. Because the war on Terror is not the same as a war on the actual people who attacked us. Our enemy was clear but the war declared was not. Al-Qaeda was not specified as our enemy, the ideal of Terrorism was and under that unspecified umbrella, Bush pushed his way into needless, hopeless war. That's the danger of weak and vague language. It can be used to hide your true intentions.

padikiller

Sun 18 Nov 2007 10:18 PM

Line by line with AhmNee

The point is vague and misleading language.

padikiller wonders

What is "vague" or "misleading" about stating that the "enemies of freedom" did what they did?...

AhmNee drones on

We were attacked by al-Qaeda. But war was not declared on al-Qaeda, it was declared on terrorism.

padikiller respondes

War was never declared at all.. What have you been smoking?

AhmNee persists

If war would have been declared on al-Qaeda, we'd have been focused in Afghanistan and on finding Osama Bin Laden and cutting off the head and funding of their operations.

padikiller keeps it real

You can't "declare war" on an international terrorist orgaization...

But in 2001.... We did EXACTLY what you stated.. We went to Afghanistan, kicked the Taliban out of power and chased bin Laden into a cave, from which he has never surfaced...

AhmNee just won't quit

Progress that the US and UN have made in Afghanistan is failing and the Taliban is regaining it's hold on the country.

padikiller responds

The Taliban is fighting Afghans (the Nothern Alliance) who are supported by a NATO force..

The reason behind the recent insurgency is the effectiveness of a poppy eradication program that is hitting the Taliban in its pocketbook.. Success comes at a price..

AhmNee enters his magical time machine

While our forces were busy with Iraq, a country that had no connection with al-Qaeda

First of all... we didn't INVADE IRAQ UNTIL 2003!...

Why is it so hard for you squeeze this little slice of reality between your ears?..

Nick Lemann is talking about a speech given in 2001... More than TWO YEARS before we invaded Iraq!

More imporantly... You are wrong... There were documented meetings between Saddam's agents and Al Quaida operatives.. While there is no direct proof that Saddam participated in the 9/11 attacks, you are just flat-out WRONG when you claim that there was no relationship between Saddam and Al Quaida..

AhmNee blithers on

[Saddam] was of no threat to our national security,

padikiller responds

LOL...

That's why the UN slapped sanctions on him... For not being a threat to security....

Get real, Dude...

AhmNee is Like the Energizer Liberal

Osama Bin Ladin has escaped and is still free to plot ways to damage our country.

padikiller agrees

So?... That's why we need to find and kill him...

AhmNee's monotone continues

Because the war on Terror is not the same as a war on the actual people who attacked us. Our enemy was clear but the war declared was not.

padikiller responds

Pure bullshit...

All Quaida is an international terrorist ring with operations on six out of seven continents.. They are fluid and well-funded... They receive direct or indirect support from many goverments... You can't just "declare war" on these people..

AhmNee drones

Al-Qaeda was not specified as our enemy, the ideal of Terrorism was

padikiller scoffs

And when EXACTLY did President Bush "specify" the "ideal of Terrorism" as the "enemy"?...

More silliness..

President Bush labeled the attackers as the "enemies of freedom"... Are you saying that they are allies in freedom? What exactly are you saying here?

Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

and under that unspecified umbrella, Bush pushed his way into needless, hopeless war.

padikiller scoffs again

A very necessary and hugely successful war, you mean...

milligence

Tue 20 Nov 2007 02:47 AM

What both both A & P fail to realize is that "enemies of freedom" is circular reasoning, loaded circular reasoning, loaded as in sopping wet with deception.

Shall we? Let's shall.

Enemies of freedom. "Of" seems straightforward so we'll skip that, otherwise the Ghost of What Is Is Past will pay us a visit.

Enemies - the opposition (who? to what? to whom? what are the "whom" doing that the "who" are opposing?), the bad (what do they do?) men.

Freedom - liberty, rights, etc. (of who? to do what? to whom?)

Same questions both times... should give you a hint at what's wrong here.

JUST HOLD ON ONE COTTON PICKIN MINUTE!

How do we know they oppose freedom? You see "Enemies of Freedom" is an association of one thing with another. It lacks the functioning valid middle that truth requires. It's nothing but a bloody assertion. That's not an argument or debate, it's a promotion of an idea.

And no matter how you fill in the blanks, whether you blame Ay-rabs, Marshuns, Shiite Al Qaeda (whatever that is) it is of no use. The claim is mechanically crippled from being able to express any truth. That's what is vague and changing and dodgy about it.

padikiller

Tue 20 Nov 2007 07:41 AM

milligence wrote Just hold on one cotton pickin minute! How do we know they [the head-lopping, intolerant, antidemocratic, misogynistic, homophobic terrorists who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks] oppose freedom?

padikiller responds??? We seem to have missed the Realityville exit and now find ourselves stuck in the mind-numbing traffic on the McLearyland Expressway.

AhmNee

Tue 20 Nov 2007 10:35 AM

While I had some trouble following that, myself, I believe Milligence illustrates a valid point. The language being used is weak and non-specific and hardly representative of the facts.

What exactly is an "Enemy of Freedom"? To be honest, I think Padikiller and President Bush are Enemys of Freedom as they're either destroying American Liberties in Bush's case ... or enabling the destruction of American Liberties by dismissing or making excuses for it in Padikiller's case.

You could make an argument that anyone who disagrees with your opinions is an Enemy of Freedom and that's the entire problem with the "war on terror". Instead of clearly labeling our enemies, the language is vague and unspecific so that the administration has an easier time shoehorning whomever they'd like into the role. Including the American People. (After all, if you don't agree with the administration and dissent against the war, well, you're aiding the enemy. Right?)

milligence

Tue 20 Nov 2007 12:10 PM

Prejudices are not actions. You're going to have to let that crutch go P.

Opposing freedom means going out of your way to do it.

If X says we need to restrict such and such activity and claims it's for safety but really it's for social control and what not, that's an enemy of freedom regardless whether he's a kook, a greedy war monger, or god forbid some militant self appointed saint. An attack no matter what the philosophy is an attack. A campaign against freedom means calling for martial law and taking your sweet time revoking it. Pakistan anyone? Oddly enough Pakistan didn't attack.

Enemies of freedom also implies an attack on freedom. Does Osama have a favorite amendment he'd like to remove?

And don't start with the Caliphate crap. I can find a hundred bums in New York City with half-cocked opinions about women, gays, speech, and govt. Hell I can find them on most christian channels too which is sad since I try to be better than that.

padikiller

Tue 20 Nov 2007 08:39 PM

It Just Gets Sillier And Sillier

What exactly is an "Enemy of Freedom"?

padikiller enlightens

Somebody who conspires to hijack a passenger plane with innocent civilians on board and then pilots it into an office building full of innocent civilians in order to make a statement (or to get laid in Paradise)..

Specifically speaking, that is....

AhmNee

Wed 21 Nov 2007 12:32 PM

See how easy it is to "hijack" that vague language and make it mean whatever you want it to? Thank you for the illustration of my point, Padi.

padikiller

Wed 21 Nov 2007 05:59 PM

Just when you thought the posting here couldn't get sillier...AhmNee shows up to prove us wrong.

foampeanut

Mon 26 Nov 2007 04:29 PM

"The target of political language is the marginal players not the committed." If only this were true, we might have been spared 9/11. Just as religious texts shore up belief, political language is aimed less at potential converts than to rouse true believers. Bush's bubble isn't people, per se, but their discourse, if you will, their political language. Many a blog reader can vouch the Bush base takes seriously phrases, Orwell would have laughed at, if only to keep from crying.

Rasquelle

Sun 9 Dec 2007 10:49 PM

Guys...you're all fiddling while Rome (in this case, Georgia) burns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc

Mike B

Wed 2 Jan 2008 05:44 PM

As Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann's article could be more helpful if he applied it to the writing and reporting of journalists.

How many journalists, for example, mark the anniversary of Eason Jordan's op-ed piece in the NYT back in 2003 when the then-head of CNN News ("the most trusted name in news") belatedly admitted to censoring the news of torture, terror and assassination plots out of Iraq under Saddam Hussein for 12 years (yes, years). This staggering admission of censorship and supression of information stirred virtually no qualms of conscience or warnings about trust among the traditional news media.

In August, the 22nd annual Pew survey affirmed that public trust in the press continues to be dismal; but it is not apparent that the news industry is listening. It is a telling fact that the press has virtually ceased reporting on its own negative poll results while it publishes weekly polls about everyone else. Apparently, some polls are more newsworthy than others -- or some pigs are more equal, as Orwell warned.

NYT Baghdad Bureau Chief John Burns was far more direct than Dean Lemann in "The Moral Compass of Iraq" from the book, "Embedded -- The Media At War in Iraq," Bill Katovsky, Timothy Carlson (Lyons Press, © 2003). In this oral history, two-time Pulitzer prize winning Journalist Burns spoke about the "toxic" corruption of the news industry:

“Without contest, I was the most closely watched and unfavored of all the correspondents there [in Iraq] because of what I wrote about terror whilst Saddam Hussein was still in power. … I described how Saddam had turned this country into a slaughterhouse. Where he might have been responsible for the deaths of as much as a million people. … I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay. … Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror. … Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It’s not impossible to tell the truth. … [Referring to journalists who present themselves as heroes] As a matter of fact, I think this vainglorious ambition is part of the same problem really. It is the pursuit of power. Renown. Fame. … There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics.”

annika1

Thu 3 Jan 2008 12:38 PM

Stunning level of irony here, not only in Lemann's use of fuzzy phrases and political bias (“federal welfare state”: isn't a state the means by which, in a democracy, people provide for their own welfare, by definition; didn’t Grover Norquist come up with that one?)

The press is certainly in bad shape when the head of the most powerful journalism school in the country writes:

"When the process of determining whether the facts of a situation have been intentionally corrupted by people in power (whether, let’s say, Saddam Hussein had the ability to produce nuclear weapons, or whether a new drug has harmful side effects), there often is no corrective mechanism at hand, as there is in cases of the intentional corruption of language."

So this must be the problem with no cause and no solution.

Most information corruption works hand in hand with politically-spun language, to a mutual, political end. This is not a problem without a name, and it's not without a corrective either. Few would disagree that the concentrated mainstream media outlets Columbia aims to send its students to, is the primary corrupter of information in America. Only support for an independent, popular, and publicly-funded media will provide the corrective. It's not surprising to me (as a former J-schooler) that Lemann has no vision to address the problems.

Instead, in the same piece in which he mentions Orwell’s proposal to ban the word “freedom,” he insists we have a "free society" and a "public square" when the entire electoral process and the scope of political debate is controlled by concentrated corporate power. The public square largely does not exist, as Richard Sennett pointed out years ago. Even within the official public square of the election, the presidential candidates who have used the most honest and blunt language to date, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, have been excluded from full participation in debates because they all lack corporate sponsors. (Obama does not lack them and has not been excluded.)

Lemann’s unfortunate catch words give the lie to his arguments.

One last ironic claim made by Lemann:
“Conversely, active and widespread political participation decreases the importance of language, and thus, for good or ill, reduces the role of writers, intellectuals, and propagandists in the political system.”

I thought increased political participation would increase the role of all those, simply because more people would be writing, thinking and trying to push ideas. The writers he must be talking must be his fellow New Yorker staffers and NYT best-selling authors – and if so Mr. Lemann lives in a far different world than the average Jane or Joe.

The elite bias here is unmistakable and leaves Lemann looking foolish to say the least. I actually think this is one for the history books.

Colin Brayton

Mon 7 Jan 2008 01:15 PM

Point well-taken. One of the most pernicious myths in contemporary journalism, I think, is the idea that journalism is a literary occupation, and that being a good journalist requires being an excellent writer and storyteller -- and only that. Some of the best fact-finders I have worked with as an editor spell atrociously, mix metaphors, wallow in clichés, mangle syntax, and other sins agaist the language of Shakespeare. But that is what editors are for. And there are very skilled writers out there who think that you can just make stuff up and still sell it is as nonfiction. In an age in which there are editors who thinks that translators and copy editors can be replaced by software -- a form of delusional thinking upon which many an editor has come to grief -- we have lost the notion that collecting and communicating information on a deadline is a collective effort, requiring many different talents that very few people have mastered all of. It is as though we were to refuse to move out of the way when someone warned us, "A big elefunt is abawt to sat on your hed." Just because the spelling was atrocious.

brutus

Thu 17 Jan 2008 06:07 PM

I don't have to say much to tell you how much I appreciate this piece. Great writing. I loved it.

TDC

Tue 22 Jan 2008 01:34 PM

So many shitty arguments, so little time

What exactly is an "Enemy of Freedom"?
I don’t know, hows bout someone who beheads another for playing soccer, owning a camera, murdering their daughter/wife for being raped or wearing makeup? Would that qualify?

And don't start with the Caliphate crap. I can find a hundred bums in New York City with half-cocked opinions about women, gays, speech, and govt.

I am sure you could find 100 bums, but would your opinion still hold true if you could find 100 million bums? What if these bums had wealthy and sympathetic financial supporters with billions of dollars? What if these bums had amongst them the technical savy and the finances to build nuclear weapons? Would you be a little concerned then?

Hell I can find them on most christian channels too which is sad since I try to be better than that.
Next time you see a Christian beheading a 10 year old on the internet, let me know.

And just as a quick aside, when are we going to have the “global warming” politics of fear debate? Certainly no one involved in the global warming swindle … er I mean scientific discourse could be guilty of trying to scare or control anyone.

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