Ace had a great post earlier this week about using the passive voice to mask the truth. But using the passive voice isn't the only way people use language to try to gloss over their true meaning. One need only look at "Crawford Wives" group I referenced earlier. The posters are made by an organization called Bush v. Choice. But what's "choice"? It's abortion. Pro-abortion groups always refer to themselves as "pro-choice", when, of course, the only choice they care about is abortion. I guess choice just sounds nicer than abortion.

I was reminded of this last night while watching NBC's Olympic coverage. They had a surprisingly interesting feature on Polish WWII POWs who held a makeshift Olympic Games in their camp in 1942. The piece featured a handful of the survivors and was actually quite moving. However, after the taped feature Bob Costas did a quick follow up and mentioned how the POWs were moved to another camp near the end of the war and were barely saved from approaching Nazi liquidation squads by the Americans.

Hold on. Scroll up and read that last sentence again. Bob Costas referred to Nazi "liquidation squads". What the hell is that? Why did he use a euphemism? These were murder squads. Plain and simple. Now, I can understand the Nazis using that kind of language ("final solution" anyone?) to pretty up their actions, but why are people doing it now? Are we trying to pretend the Nazis weren't a bunch of murderers?

Actually, I may have just answered my own question there. Because, if we can pretend that the Nazis just "liquidated" people rather than murdered them, then maybe we can pretend that the looney lefties that will be screaming "Bush=Hitler" at the RNC next week aren't, well, looney.