Historians looking back on the era of Bush, Cheney, Rummie and their buddies will find the cultural landscape littered with verbal coprolites -family values, compassionate conservatism, clear skies, culture of life, people of faith, and so on - that were readily recognisable as offensive little dollops when they were freshly dropped into public discourse, but have since hardened, through endless repetition in the media, into harmless sounding cliches. Then there are phrases like 'preemptive strike', 'weapons of mass destruction', and 'illegal combatant', that still reek in ways that are impossible to disguise. I couldn't imagine touching these without the protection of scare quotes, the writer's equivalent of the dog-walker's plastic bag.
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