Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.” This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of the country. Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need. This would all be comical and merely peculiar if it didn’t reflect a larger, more troubling reality: The confusion of language is a direct result...