The difficult thing about Orwellian mendacity is keeping one’s verbal guard up. It is a simple enough matter to declare that “War is Peace” as did the masters of Newspeak in 1984. But even if one exercises ceaseless vigilance, reality has a way of breaking in and demonstrating rudely that war, after all, really is not the same thing as peace. This is the case with “affirmative action,” which we have always regarded as one of the great Orwellian coinages of our time. What the phrase really means, of course, is “preferential treatment”: i.e., institutionally enforced discrimination on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, or some other victim trait-of-the-month quality. And while, with practice, liberals find it easy to say that “affirmative action” promotes fairness and discourages discrimination, the results are so obviously unfair and discriminatory that even the most committed liberal id ...

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