it’s too late, baby

Jack Shafer seems to think that if only people were more aware of “unspeak”—the PR-fueled and poll-tested reductionist shorthand vocabulary that is introduced into our public discourse at an alarming rate; whose existence has been the source of contentious debate for at least twenty years (but who’s counting?); which has been used by political campaigns for at least as long; and that has picked up in global popularity as the Age of Political Correctness began— then we could simply stop the subliminial selling of political messages (i.e., propaganda) through the too-cunning-by-half use of language.

Pro-life supposes that a fetus is a person and that those who are anti-pro-life are against life,… Pro-choice distances its speakers from actually advocating abortion, while casting “adversaries as ‘anti-choice’; as interfering, patriarchal dictators.”

Unspeak (also the title of a book, by Steven Poole), Shafer explains, is

an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.

This stuff is right up my alley, but something is weird about Shafer’s piece. Shafer writes about this subject as if his audience were a tabula rasa and yet he never mentions the contemporary dark prince of political language —longtime Republican consultant/pollster Frank Luntz (currently unaffiliated, I just read somewhere). Shafer cannot possibly be unaware of Luntz.

Nor can Shafer be unaware that this technique is increasingly used by the Democrats—and indeed the media—who now engage in the language wars with panache (and success: they turned Bush’s “surge” into an “escalation”; and NBC took great pride in being the first to call Bush’s “insurgency” in Iraq a “civil war”).

What gives?

Also: does this apply only to the hidden political messages that are aimed at good-hearted Americans by evil corporationa and politicians?

Or do words like “Koranic food“—seriously!—count?