Humpty Dumpty founded the art of spin when he told Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

PR flaks, including yours truly, have made a not-bad living from that advice ever since. But nobody took that aphorism to heart quite the way the American right did. They’ve strip-mined the dictionary to find pretty words for ugly concepts: “family… Read more...