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"Wretchard" is the nom-de-blog of Richard Fernandez, who currently resides in Sydney, Australia. His blog, Belmont Club is one of the more thoughtful and thought-provoking corners of the Internet.

Recently, he posted--ostensibly about Obama's political manuvering regarding Iran. Then, as he often does, he whipsaws you with some insight that you can only wonder at how he made that connection.

Here's what I'm talking about:

I digress in order to make the point that the current malaise (if I can use a Carter word) won’t be solved by unelecting Obama. Somehow a large part of the country is using a dictionary of nonsense; it has to be persuaded to amend its dictionary object; to change the collections contained in its vocabulary, otherwise it will be irremediable gibberish. This crazy, politically correct dictionary has been in use for some time and many people can only think using its definitions. But persuading people to change it will be very hard. Only they can make the change for we are not going to browbeat millions into using our preferred table of definitions. Perhaps Orwell was right. The key to groupthink is to create a language in which no real thought other than obedience to fantasy can be expressed. And now Newspeak is in widespread use. Even at the UN.

The important implication of this is that the current crisis has deep political and cultural roots. There’s no quick fix and it’s useless to try for one. It will be a long slog and in the end, it may be a trudge over the cliff.

How strange it is that some of the 10 commandments had to do with dictionaries and speech: “thou shalt not bear false witness”, “though shalt not put strange gods before Me”. The ancient lawgivers know something we’ve forgotten: fantasy kills.