Alterman's anti-Bush jargon

One of the key tactics of political jargon* is confounding intention and (alleged) effect, as in this passage from Eric Alterman today:

In the name of fighting "terrorism," the administration has sent 40 percent of the National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away.

The phrase "in order to" clearly implies that the Bush administration wanted to "create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away." Alterman would no doubt claim that he's just being sarcastic, but that's an easy excuse that allows him (and people like him) to make this sort of vile suggestion.

(* By jargon, I mean the highly engineered and manipulative language used by pundits, politicians and PR experts.)

Comments

[mark]

The problem with Alterman complaining about the Bush admin not preparing the country, is that I have little doubt that he was upset for Condi Rice, using the term 'mushroom cloud' in explaining possible threats to the country.

So basically the NSA advisor was fear mongering, in alterman/democrats world. No need to prepare for worst case.

I'm quite sure if Bush said, "we are cutting Federal funding to Louisiana until they fix their levees" would have gone over big. Almost as big as, "We realize that Louisiana has failed to spend their money on the levee system, so we are going to send them more until they get it done."

[Theophrastus Bonbastus von Hoehenheim den Sidste]

Just to make sure that we are reading from the same page, which claim do you deny?

"the administration has sent 40 percent of the National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan"

or, that the associated adventures have

"create[d] more terrorists and let bin Laden get away."

For extra credit, how many nuclear weapons did Iraq - in fact - possess?

Theophrastus Bonbastus von Hoehenheim
den Sidste