Let’s hope it really was a slip of tongue, or that Kurtz really isn’t that familiar with the details of the story, and is simply being dragged kicking and screaming by new media into covering a story that ordinarily, he and the rest of CNN wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Because otherwise, Kurtz’s euphemism would be a textbook example of what George Orwell wrote about in “Politics and the English Language,” when he said that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”