The antics continue as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do the verbal trapeze act, tossing one another to and fro.

Most recently, Clinton switched her act to slight of hand tricks, apparently assuming her audience lacked the intelligence to figure out the game by making allegations that President Bush has allowed outsourcing of jobs to China that should have been kept here in the US for American citizens. Paraphrasing, her message states that Bush could have stopped this atrocious injustice on the American economy.

Interesting. Let’s review. Between 1993 and 2001, the President made numerous trips to China to build relations. Okay, I see how this is totally Bush’s fault -oh, wait! Who was president during that time? Why, none other than Hillary’s illustrious husband, William Jefferson Clinton. Since he was providing an avenue by which such relations could be established, I wonder why Hillary didn’t put a stop to that, since she’s so concerned about the American economy. To further illustrate, click on the link below for an article from 1998 indicating that Bill Clinton was the first president to visit China in nearly a decade.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1367/is_199807/ai_n5584080

To further relations with China, click on the link to see how Bill Clinton continued building relations through fundraising efforts with China.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-clintonchina13apr13,1,254417.story

Perhaps Hillary should move from the slight of hand to being the gypsy fortune teller. She’s much better at vague statements and empty promises. The US has been outsourcing jobs for years, so if this was such a concern to her, she had 8 years to do something about it when she was the First Lady, and most recently in her Senate position.

What is worse than “political correctness?” In my opinion it has to be “corporate speak,” an insidious disease that plagues senior and c-level management. If left untreated, it quickly spreads throughout the company hampering speech to proportions not seen since the Tower of Babel.

The symptoms range from excessive use of acronyms and abbreviations to frequent vocalizations of long and complicated words. Depending on the progression of the disease, the observer may notice the occasional misused word, or worse, invented terminology. Some of my favorite examples include:

irregardless - No such word. This is actually a double negative: “ir-” meaning “not” and “-less” meaning “without.”

deliverable - It is an adjective, not a noun.

form factor - Unless you are chatting about particle physics, leave this term out of your conversation.

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell noted that there were a lot of bad habits prevalent in communications that were being spread by imitation. He postulated that this would eventually lead to the collapse of natural language as we know it. Are we already there? Orwell pointed out four bad habits that can easily be spotted today: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words.

The latter two seem to be most prevalent today. Pretentious diction is most often observed in those higher up the corporate ladder. Meaningless words abound in shareholder communications.

Take a moment today and listen carefully, is that English or “corporate speak?” Can you tell the difference?

As I listened to the drive-by media play clips of the last Clinton-Obama debate, I couldn’t help but wonder to which special interest groups they were pandering. Anything that either of them espouses carries the enormous costs (to us taxpaying middle class citizens) of yet another entitlement program. Neither will really come out and say what they really want to do - redistribute wealth. Both see themselves as modern day Robin Hood.

There are some in this country that have the outrageous attitude that the world “owes” them and they want to collect “now.” Forget about honest pay for honest work.

Since Hoover, we’ve been raising generations of people who succeed at playing the victim role in a manner deserving an Oscar. They don’t want to take responsibility for the personal decisions they’ve made. Nor can they distinguish between a necessity and an indulgence. As a result, we foot the bill.

You, the voter, have 198 days to make a decision. More entitlements, anyone?