I Hate The Way That They Lie All The Time

In some ways, this sort of thing has come to represent for me what's wrong with the Bush junta every bit as much as their illegal war.

Some Americans Lack Food, but USDA Won't Call Them Hungry

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 16, 2006; Page A01

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."

Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.

Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is "not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey." Nord, a USDA sociologist, said, "We don't have a measure of that condition."

The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group.

It's like polluting and calling it "Clear Skies." It's like setting up an education program, the only demonstrable value of which is to allow your loser brother to sell stuff, and calling it "No Child Left Behind." It's like a coward who did everything that he could to avoid serving calling a decorated war hero a coward. It's like, well, it's like something out of George Orwell and it's incredibly dangerous. Once words have no meaning at all, we lose our ability to communicate.

People who don't have enough food are hungry. I know that no one in the Bush junta has ever experienced what it's like not to have enough food; if they had, they'd know that, when that happens, you're hungry.