Reply #28: From the New York Times:

[Ignis]

In fact, the language of the Center for Consumer Freedom is as Orwellian as it is possible to get. Its basic linguistic strategy could have been taken directly from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," still the most important single essay on how to lie without seeming to. It would hardly work for C.C.F. simply to tell the truth - to say to consumers, on behalf of the food and beverage industries, "Activists and watchdog groups are trying to stop us from selling you anything we want to sell you." Much better to say, "These groups are trying to prevent you from buying anything you want to buy." Then it becomes a matter of sustaining freedom, protecting individual rights and keeping the prairie of consumer choices unfenced.

The blurring of the distinction between corporate interests and the individual and collective rights of humans is one of the central tropes of our time and the source of much purposeful confusion, of the kind that the Center for Consumer Freedom exploits. It may have its root, philosophically, in the legal fiction that a corporation is a person. But it is used again and again to hide from people exactly how their interests are being abused. It also keeps people from seeing the delicate balance that must be struck between their individual rights and the rights of the community at large. When you hear someone howling about freedom, it is worth asking whose freedom he means.

Protecting "the full range of choices that American consumers currently enjoy" can only be the mission of someone who believes that those choices come without cost and that the only ethic that matters is the bottom line. But every consumer choice carries a cost, and the purpose of a real consumer advocate should be to make those costs - both moral and financial, to oneself and to others - perfectly clear. That, of course, is something that industries profiting from the untrammeled appetites of Americans cannot afford.

Is it hypocritical for C.C.F. to attack PETA? Since its basic rhetorical strategy is hypocritical, the answer is almost certainly yes. Is it hypocritical for PETA to euthanize dogs and cats, as C.C.F. claims it does? Only if you believe that the ethical treatment of animals never includes euthanasia. The obvious retort to PETA Kills Animals is PETA Saves Animals. But that doesn't make much of a billboard.

-- NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/opinion/24sun3.html