Live Not by Lies (Newt: legalization, not amnesty)

National Review (NRO) ^ | Nov 28, 2012 | Mark Krikorian

[heiss]

What bugs me most about Gingrich’s amnesty thing is the depressingly familiar dishonesty. As Katrina reports, he says:

"I am not for amnesty for anyone. I am not for a path to citizenship for anybody who got here illegally. But I am for a path to legality for those people whose ties are so deeply into America that it would truly be tragic to try and rip their family apart." [emphasis added]

Put aside the problems with amnesty — implementation riddled with fraud, a magnet to future illegal immigration, insincere promises of future enforcement, playing legal immigrants for chumps, etc. What’s really grating is the Orwellian attempt to redefine words, telling people words don’t mean what they think they mean. “Path to legality” joins “regularization,” “normalization,” “earned-status adjustment,” and all the other sleazy euphemisms we’ve been hearing for years now.

[The_Reader_David]

It is only because “amnesty” got broadened form its actual meaning to include anything other than “deport them all” (and not by Newt’s critics, but by folks insistent on stricter immigration policy and stricter enforcement for decades before), but that the word sometimes reverts to its actual meaning when it suits whoever is using it, that Newt is obliged to create neologisms.

Neologisms which create precision, which is what “path to non-deportation” drawing a distinction from “path to citizenship” does, are not Newspeak. Newspeak debases the language, the coinage of thought, by making it imprecise and malleable to political ends. You may not like Newt, or his ideas, but he is very precise in what he means, and uses language very carefully.

[dirtboy]

It is only because “amnesty” got broadened form its actual meaning to include anything other than “deport them all”

Nice strawman. Being against amnesty can also include making illegals want to self-deport.

So having set up your own sophistry on amnesty, you create an articifical necessity for Newt to create neologisms.

When past experience shows that simply enforcing existing laws and eliminating bennies would go a long ways towards making illegals want to self-deport.