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They're not biscuits.  I'm still unnerved by the zany response by Bush and Cheney to the Sept. 11 Commission's finding that the contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." [Washington Post, June 18, 2004]. In response, Bush chanted: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

The noble purpose of language is to communicate. We don't get our news predominantly by contact with airborn pheromones and we don't sniff tails, so for us language is pretty much it. That makes it important that we have some integrity in its use, even if we can entertain ourselves through its misuse or creative variations—as we do with humor, the short story, novels, and the office memorandum. When we misuse it, but not for the purposes of entertainment, we call that some form of the Lie (misleading, cheating, deceiving, speaking with a forked tongue, talking out of both sides of the mouth, and other such phrases to indicate that the communicator is pointing one way but trying to lead us in another). And we don't approve of it when the perceived aim is clearly to communicate directly.

There are a few forms of communication that seem to fall outside of this envelope. One is what contemporary linguists call "framing," where by your choice of words you evoke a certain attitude and effectively shape how we think. Whether we're talking about affective meaning or semantic differentials, the term "mother" is about as close in sense to "adult female parent" as "neighbor" is to "guy next door," as "organic" is to "natural." Such is the stuff of propaganda, enabling our elected officials to talk about "tax relief" and "silent majority" and to trade terms such as "corporate logging" for something friendlier, like "Healthy Forests Initiative."

Still another form of communication falls out of these boundaries, and that is when one points to a social indiscretion without coming right out and talking about it. Consider my friend, Larson, who likes to speak in aphorisms. Sometimes he is profound, but more often than not he just manages to come across as cryptic, and you really aren't sure if he means to be the one or the other. For example, you might be at a cocktail party and he would look over at you, take a bite of pâté on a cracker and say, "Leisure is the ultimate test of a culture's capacity for upholding its future." Now you might not know what he's talking about, or why on earth he's even looking at you, but you still want to know what's on his mind and will engage him in conversation. When that's done, he'll move on and say to someone else something like "Dieting is the modern equivalent of an ancient Roman strategy for eating a super-size meal without having to digest it." If you weren't at a cocktail party, you would think that maybe he's a ranter, or he's skipped his medication, and you'd quickly head for the other side of the street, but you aren't and so he gets your attention. But that's not my point, and I apologize for the roundabout way of getting to what I really want to say—how we point out the social indiscretion without actually coming right out and talking about it. So let's suppose you're browsing the discount books at a Barnes & Noble and my friend Larson and suddenly walks up to you and says, "The bald eagle has been reborn." I told you he could be cryptic. But instead of wanting to engage in conversation with him, though, you glance around the room furtively—and then you look down to see if your fly is open. That's the usual response from men. "New Zealand possesses two bats found nowhere else in the world" always has guys heading for their pants zipper. When women get one of these abrupt aphorisms from him, like "Smooth-skin fruits suffer more from beetle infestation than those with down," they think they have something in their teeth and hurry to the ladies' room to check it out. Larson doesn't make friends easily.

So what does this have to do with Bush and Cheney and their eager talk about an Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda relationship? They want to say now that all they meant was that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda. And, guys, we're still checking our flies and the girls are in the ladies' room looking for something in their teeth. As we Southerners would say: If the cat has kittens in the oven, we don't call them biscuits.

A wink is a declarative sentence.  American Christians have squandered an enormous opportunity to display good Christian behavior to a world that needs our example, not the example of angry Jihadists or menacing, furtive, terror-minded warriors emerging from the fringe of a radical Islam. Instead, looking back at nearly three years of bad behavior on the part of our leadership (a leadership which professes a Christian foundation), we have managed only to respond in kind. Perhaps George W. Bush really is a good and decent man and maybe he is sincere in his faith; it could be, too, when he makes public expressions of prayer, that he is doing more than closing his eyes and looking pious, but genuinely is praying—not that he won't be found out as a poseur, really, but that he does what is good and what is in accordance with our Father's will.

Among the bad things that stand out from this leadership is the ridiculous attempt to step away from the truth and finally set the record straight by saying that no one in the Bush Administration said what everyone thought they said, although they had no problem with everyone's thinking what we thought they said when they said it, because it served the purpose at the time, but doesn't now. Now both Bush and Cheney are swaggering about with proud wounds of indignation in the light of the Sept. 11 Commission's now-public conviction that Iraq played no role in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Harumph, they say, taking umbrage at the very thought that they might be guilty of a misleading imprecision, as they slink off into the shade of their own discontent. "The press is, with all due respect there are exceptions, often times lazy, often simply reports what someone else in the press says without doing their homework," Cheney said.[1]  Let us hope that Cheney, who is trying to hold a lazy press responsible for blurring the fine distinction they were then making, is not accusing the press, lazy or not, of failing to report the wink. The wink I'm talking about is the very kind that both he and the President enjoy making, often with smugness and a smirk, like "there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida" (wink-wink), "Saddam Hussein had the ability to make weapons" (wink-wink), and "He could have developed a nuclear weapon over time" (wink-wink).[2] This is a subtlety that was never stated but still hung in the air like the odor that remains after a meal of fried chitterlings. We all knew it was there. They knew it was there and made no attempt to dispel it. Was it the responsibility of the press, lazy or not, to express the nuance? Had they done this, had they been able to do this, wouldn't the result have been to point out that the reason for the invasion of Iraq was to preempt the actions of a crazy man who was full of bluff and bluster and had more desires for evil than the will or capacity to act?

Christian Americans should stand shoulder to shoulder against further expressions of such imprecision from our Christian leadership and speak forthrightly, perhaps with our voting ballots, against an administration that seeks not the good of a neighbor's best intentions, but the fluent expression (with or without the wink) of angry warring men with hard hearts. We shouldn't forget the cautionary words of William Penn, "When you speak, be sure to speak the truth, for misleading is halfway to lying, and lying is the whole way to hell."[3]

1. Source: MSNBS News, June 18, 2004
2. Source: New York Times, February 8, 2004
3. Some Fruits of Solitude (ed. Eric K. Taylor, Herald Press, 2003)

Return of the body count.  MSNBC today reprinted a death table from London's Reuters news service listing the total number of deaths in Iraq since the beginning of fighting, as of today. I supply a copy of it here. Figures in parentheses are numbers of dead since May 1, 2003, when President Bush said that major combat was over. The data came from the the Pentagon's latest death tally (a.k.a. body count):

U.S.-LED COALITION FORCES KILLED:

COMBAT/ATTACKS

United States    609   (500)

Britain          20    (12)

Other nations    50    (50)

NON-COMBAT

United States    218   (189)

Britain          38    (13)

Other nations    7     (7)

IRAQIS KILLED:

MILITARY         4,895 to 6,370 [think-tank estimates]

CIVILIANS        Between 9,436 and 11,317

What has to be more shocking (I mean, as if the sheer numbers were not numbing enough) are the civilian death totals. What are they called? Oh, yeah, collateral. The Iraqi civilian death totals, Reuters notes, are figures supplied by www.iraqbodycount.net, run by academics and peace activists, based on incidents reported by at least two media sources.