- The Guardian
- Issue #2178
Terrorism
The Weasel Word of the week. We all know what terrorism is, but senior figures in the US Trump administration have redefined it while trying to explain what looks like murder to most people. If you listen to their explanations of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, those people were ‘domestic terrorists’ because one tried to drive away from ICE, while the other was watching a protest and holding a phone.
Quiet
Stan Grant, who has moved from being a much-loved broadcaster to a master of waffle, has written a reflective piece of nothing to the effect that other people should be quieter about racism and injustice because it disturbs his sense of deep, meaningful and vague inner peace. “I know I can speak only in the quiet spaces,” he writes with the calm confidence of someone who never shuts up. Based on past performance, no space can be truly quiet when it contains Stan Grant.
Abundance
In general abundance sounds like a good thing, with overtones of an abundance of food, money or other nice things. Recently there’s an abundance movement, named by a book of the same title, published in the US and lapped up by credulous centrist commentators there, in Australia, and elsewhere. The idea is deceptively simple: if we only cut ‘red tape’ and stopped making it hard to build things, we’d be up to our ears in housing and renewable energy. It’s a massive coincidence that this approach would make the rich richer and the poor poorer, not to mention all the animal habitats that would be destroyed because the ‘red tape’ that protected them was torn up. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and you can’t have renewables and more houses without giving developers what they want according to the Abundance crowd.
Respecting
This is one of those weasel words politicians kind of have to say even though everyone knows they’re untrue. Far-right former SAS member and MP Andrew Hastie was thinking of challenging Sussan Ley for the position of Liberal Party leader. He’s backed down, at time of writing, because other Liberals have mostly said they don’t want him as leader. Hastie has said he’s “respecting” his colleagues’ honest feedback, presumably by not challenging Ley because he doesn’t have a hope. He has however pulled off the feat of being even less popular than Ley.
Recover
Weaselly because you can’t recover something that wasn’t yours to begin with. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that the US will “recover” Venezuela. What this means is that the Trump administration will threaten Venezuela while Trump and Rubio talk as though they’re in total control of a sovereign nation.
Framework
Weasel Words hasn’t read, The Art of the Deal, the book written under Donald Trump’s name. There’s a strong possibility Trump hasn’t read it either. From what the US President says, we wonder if it should have been called “The Art of Talking As Though You Have a Deal.” It looks like Denmark isn’t going to hand Greenland over to the US, and the Greenlanders don’t want to be US property. Trump has said that he’s got “a framework of a future deal,” which sounds like he’s got bupkis.
