Political administrations rename damaging policies with positive-sounding labels to obscure their real effects

Evidence

In the George W. Bush administration’s linguistic ecological camouflaging (Salant, 2003), the distant vision of the hydrogen-powered “Freedom Car” powered by “Freedom Fuel” was intended to deflect the public’s attention from the need to reduce carbon emissions by increasing fuel efficiency in the here and now. President Bush’s proposed rewrite of the Clean Air Act, named “Clear Skies,” was intended to spare the power industry from upgrading plants to reduce pollutant emissions. An initiative that favored the timber industry with liberal logging privileges in national forests was dubbed “Healthy Forests.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2686

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the doublespeak theme in Orwell’s ‘1984’ and general political language manipulation — connects to: Rulers can make odious things acceptable simply by renaming them — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 74; Deficit labels persist under new names like ‘at risk’ after old terms fade — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 938
• SEED: An essay collecting the most audacious policy name inversions (‘Clear Skies’ that increases pollution, ‘Healthy Forests’ that enables logging) could be a strong piece on euphemism as political infrastructure.