Blackwater
As Gordon basks in the sort of adulation given only by morons, it's worth remembering for this substanceless spin, he is the man who backed Tony all the way in the Iraq nightmare. For all the guff about resurrecting Labour's collectivist soul, the reality is that it was Brown who has taken the privatisation of British publc life to areas previously unthought of.
Our friend Steven Poole over at Unspeak has some clear analysis of the word-games and manipulation going on in the coverage of Iraq and the Blackwater atrocities:
"It’s interesting how the sense of “private” seems to leak, in this carefully constructed nugget of Unspeak, “private security contractors”. The mercenaries are private contractors, in that they belong to a private company that gets paid; but the phrase also seems to imply a notion of private security, as though they are merely nice men who will install a burglar alarm at your home. One remembers the killing of four mercenaries that led to the first assault on Fallujah. Public outrage was well managed by the consistent reference to those unlucky mercenaries as simply “private contractors”, not even “security” contractors: as though the insurgents had murdered electricians or bricklayers."
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