The Negation Proclamations

I voted for the Democrats because I didn’t like the way the Republicans were running the country. Which is turning out to be like shooting yourself in the head to stop your headache.—Comedian Jack Mayberry

On Tuesday the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) held a press conference during their annual meeting to announce their field’s greatest breakthough since Noam Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” was published in 1957: Namely, they finally identified the mysterious grammatical structure that lies beneath the unique dialect of English spoken by Americans of the small but influential “elected representative” subculture. 
“We’ve studied the speech patterns of politicians, ranging from small-town mayors to U.S. presidents, over a period of 25 years,” said LSA President Sarah Framen, “and eight months ago—following years of frustration and failure—Dr. Jones and his team at the University of Pennsylvania finally unearthed the Rosetta Stone, so to speak.” 
It turns out that previous attempts pushed the search into theoretical models of ever increasing complexity; but after Dr. Jones asked his assistants to start over from zero, a fresh hypothesis developed around one of language’s oldest and most easily understood concepts—negation. The team concluded that political language had evolved into a bastardized form of English slang wherein a negative (“not” or one of its variants) is placed in every sentence where it shouldn’t be and kept out of every sentence where it should appear.

For example, when former president George W. Bush said “I am certain that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction,” he actually meant “I am certain that Saddam Hussein does [not] have weapons of mass destruction.”
“It’s somewhat akin to when an African American says ‘I am in the house, dog,’ even though he is not in a house and he is talking to a male friend, not the family pet,” Dr. Jones explained. “Language has never been completely rigid, but this political misuse of negation thing is the most deviant perversion of it we’ve found yet.”

Just as Crips and Bloods share a common dialect in spite of their fierce opposition to each other, researchers concluded that the “negation fallacy,” as they have coined it, is shared by all members of the political subculture, regardless of ideology or party affiliation. Had this pivotal moment in the understanding of human speech come just a year earlier, the electorate would have understood that when current President Barack Obama said “I will end the war in Iraq,” he was in fact saying “I will [not] end the war in Iraq.”
Early critics of the theory accused the Penn team of creating an unnecessarily elaborate explanation that merely states the obvious (that politicians lie), but upon further study even the most ardent detractors of the negation fallacy have come to accept the simple brilliance of the idea. 
“When rumors started to spread about this ‘breakthough,’ I laughed at the concept,” said a renowned linguist who wishes to remain anonymous, “But after Dr. Benton’s team at Stanford began developing the Rumsfeld corollary, I had admit they might be on to something big.”
The Rumsfeld corollary to the negation fallacy theory is based on further research which showed that politicians improperly negate (or fail to negate) verbs even when they are speaking about subjects that have nothing to do with attaining or maintaining political power.
“We interviewed former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s wife Joyce and she told us of the lifelong confusion her husband had caused with his odd use of language,” Dr. Benton said. “She said he once stated in the morning that he ‘would not like eggs for breakfast,’ so she made waffles instead, only to be ‘smacked around like a 50 dollar ho when Donald didn’t get the eggs that he thought he had requested.’”
Since then researchers have documented hundreds of similar stories told by the friends and family of politicians, proving that the problem wasn’t that politicians lie (because even pathological liars will tell the truth sometimes) but rather that an error in their application of language has plagued history with scores of simple misunderstandings, including political speech staples such as “I will fight for the rights and prosperity of the average Joe,” “I am not a stooge for multinational corporations,” and “I do believe in God.”  All of which either require the addition or removal of a negative to translate the intended meaning of each sentence into non-politician, standard English.
Historians in particular are fascinated by the implications of this new theory. One, Dr. Rachel Speziano, has even started writing a book that re-examines the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“To think that we impeached and nearly ousted a sitting president who innocently thought that he had clearly stated: ‘I did have sexual relations with that woman.’”

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