Rhoads: The Political Tower of Babel

By Mark Rhoads -

In the book of Genesis we can read about a post-flood human family that spoke only one language in the tower and city of Babel until the Lord confounded the humans so they could no longer understand each other and spoke many different languages and were scattered all over the Earth. American politics embraces the language of political confusion almost for its own sake.

Take a meaningless word like "reform" which literally only means to remake. But it sounds like something positive in political speeches. To make the concept seem even more fancy, sometimes a politician will call for "comprehensive reform" without having a clue as to what that really means either but it sounds significant.

Another meaningless word used by politicians is "affordable." No one deliberately bothers to define what that word really means because there is political advantage in letting it mean different things to different audiences so they can fill in the blanks themselves. What price point is "affordable" for one person may not be for a neighbor who makes less income.

So when you combine many meaningless and vague words and concepts together it might sound to silly journalists like a weighty legislative proposal. For example, the "Affordable Health Care Act" in 2010 was sold by the Obama Administration in 2010 as a significant "reform" measure and now the same president is pitching something he calls "comprehensive immigration reform" and he has no more clue this time as to what that really means than he did when Congress passed Obamacare without ever reading the 8,000 pages in the bill or thousands of more regulations added since.