There’s no party more smarmily mendacious in the Social Security debate than the Washington Post editorial page. As long-time readers know, for several years the GOP has been trying to fool voters and protect vulnerable incumbents with unpopular positions by continually forcing changes in the name of their policy on Social Security. For literally decades they called their private account policy ‘privatization’. But when support for the policy began to go south they insisted that the name for the policy was actually a slur. They even went so far as to say it was a name of denigration devised by Democrats.
Friday’s Post editorial on Social Security actually went so far as to ape not only the ‘it’s not privatization’ bamboozlement but even took the GOP’s lead banning the phrase ‘private accounts’ in favor of the better poll-testing ‘personal accounts’.
From the Post …
Yesterday an e-mail sent out on behalf of Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, dismissed Henry M. Paulson Jr.’s comments on “privatizing” Social Security, adding that this policy has been “soundly rejected by the American people.”
The Social Security reform that President Bush pushed last year involved personal retirement accounts. But it did not involve “privatization”: The accounts, which were to be optional, were to be designed and administered by the government, with no opportunities for Wall Street salesmen to foist enormous hidden fees on unsuspecting workers.
On one level, semantics is certainly not as important as the substance of the underlying policies words describe. In this case, ‘privatization’, by every relevant standard and criterion, is the appropriate word for the policy in question. But editorial pages are supposed to forums for forceful discussion and advocacy of policy unencumbered by either sides spin and bamboozlement, but especially by one side’s intentional efforts to deceive voters. In this case the Post really is an arm of the RNC.
