It is perhaps not that surprising that the government attempts to twist words to their own purpose and make their actions seem more reasonable when they might otherwise be questioned. Lawmakers have always tried naming their bills in ways that appeal to emotion (witness the attempts to "improve education" of children by censoring half the world wide web in an attempt to stop pornography - in actuality leaving most all pornographic sites easy to access while blocking all sorts of legitimate information, including material of political dissent or health information). The military has always tried to gain support for its actions by characterizing the enemy with vague, emotive, even blatantly inaccurate words. One hopes that people see through the rhetoric, but obviously sometimes they don't. The fact is, the corporate media just latches right on to the euphemisms of the White House, the DoJ, the military, and soon the words become common speech and fastened themselves permanently into peoples' heads. We begin to think in their terms, and so we begin to think what they want us to think. By framing the terms of discourse, they largely frame the discourse itself.

Something needs to be done to break the spell that the government holds over people through the media. People need to realize that the morning paper and the evening news may not be accurate sources of information - may in fact just be mouthpieces for deliberate coercion by those in power. Language is power, and until we take back our language, we lose the power to think for ourselves.