Creepy: FEMA'S use of term 'federal family' for government expands under Obama

"The corps is mother, the corps is father"

Our liberal rulers do everything they can to dismantle the family as the unit central to all civilization. From welfare replacing the father with Big Government, to the push to force We the People to recognize gay marriage, there is no end to it. So it's quite ironic that those same loons insist that the government is now the family of the 21st century.

In one of my all-time favorite sci-fi series Babylon 5, telepaths were automatically drafted into the psi-corps for a lifetime of indentured servitude under penalty of a lifetime on drugs to suppress their  ability or death. Once you're in, you never, ever get out. As their saying went, "the corps is mother, the corps is father." Turns out, liberals believes this of all of us with respect to the government. From The Palm Beech Post:

Don’t think of it as the federal government but as your “federal family.”

In a Category 4 torrent of official communications during the approach and aftermath of Hurricane Irene, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has repeatedly used the phrase “federal family” when describing the Obama administration’s response to the storm.

...“Under the direction of President Obama and Secretary Janet Napolitano, the entire federal family is leaning forward to support our state, tribal and territorial partners along the East Coast,” a FEMA news release declared Friday as Irene churned toward landfall.

Someone call George Orwell beyond the grave:

The G-word — “government” — has been nearly banished, with FEMA instead referring to federal, state and local “partners” as well as “offices” and “personnel.”

“'Government’ is such a dirty word right now,” says Florida State University communication professor Davis Houck. “Part of what the federal government does and any elected official does is change the terms of the language game into terms that are favorable to them.”

“Family” can evoke favorable thoughts of motherhood and security. But it can also conjure images of Big Brother and organized crime.

...During the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore responded to 1999 flooding in Iowa by pledging that “the federal family is committed to providing the necessary resources to comfort every person and family devastated by this disaster and to help them return to their normal way of living as fast as possible.”

A Google search shows the phrase appearing 10 times on FEMA’s website during the Bush years. Since Obama took office, “federal family” has turned up 118 times on fema.gov, including 50 Irene-related references.

In other words, 1984 on steroids.  More via Instapundit:

More like your drunken profligate brother-in-law who’s always hitting you up for a loan. Meanwhile, reader Bill Hesson emails:

All this creepy “federal family” business reminds me of an important insight from Hayek. Is it too much to believe that the destruction of our macro-cosmos is this Administration’s intent?

“If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once.”

The Fatal Conceit, F.A. Hayek

It’s funny how people who don’t like talk of “family values” as applied to actual families like the idea when it comes to describing the public sphere.

Indeed.