Words! Words! Words! I'm so sick of Words!

Andrew Sullivan is a silly man.  He once insisted that opponents of the the Invasion, who he labeled 

"[t]he decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead . . .may well mount what amounts to a fifth column" (part one, part two). Then, he wrote this: "[W]e might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself - a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead."

The internal links no longer work for me, and one can understand why.  If you or I had written something that monumentally silly, stupid, and mean spirited the desire to scrub it would be irresistible.  Sullivan has since equivocated and sort of recanted.  He continues his campaign to prove that Sarah Palin is actually a character in East Enders, and yet people link to Sullivan without pointing out that this man is profoundly silly.

Remember the debate on torture? Sullivan, shockingly, was right on that one. What I have in mind here, however, is the argument the pro-torture camp used.  It went something like this: what is torture anyhow? Torture opponents, which is to say reasonable and decent human beings, got bogged down in this semantic turn. Today, because of Obama's go ahead to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen actively engaged in fighting against US troops, Sullivan launched an attack on the use of assassinate as the proper term when the state in engages in assassination.  He would rather use the phrase "killed in wartime" which is his "plain English word." Obviously killed in wartime isn't a word; it's a phrase.  And, more importantly, its a phrase that obscures reality.  Does the President have the legal right to assassinate American citizens actively fighting against US troops?  I have no idea, but there is something queasy-making about the idea, and Sullivan's desire to obscure this reality lies behind the move to turn the debate over the legality and moral consequence of giving or approving this Presidential power into a discussion of the appropriateness of the word.

Sullivan also writes, concerning the tactical, operational, and political growing out the current war on terrorism and other related nouns that:

I have had only a few days to chew on these complicated eddies some more, but have ended up closer to where I started than I first thought I would in the full blast of criticism.)

I'm not sure you can chew on a eddy, and if you have to create an obfuscatory phrase to justify a policy of assassination it's more likely than not that you're wrong.  Again. And, as by the way, you don't unleash "warfare" whose awesome power does this and that.  You mobilize your military and then send young, middle-aged, and old men and women to go kill people knowing full well that some horrible things will happen and if you failed to chew these eddies then you're not really not being serious.