Yemen has fallen: Did you know that?

He was a big-name publisher, and all of us were proud he was a personal friend. One day I asked him how business was, and he said, "It's all right. We're reorganizing."

A few days later my father called me and said, "I see where your friend is filing for bankruptcy."

"What!" I roared. "That's impossible. I saw him a few days ago. He didn't say pea-turkey about any bankruptcy."

Ahh, but he had! To me, "reorganizing" meant he's going to move the shelf with all of his recent books out into his waiting room where visitors could admire it, reposition the receptionist's desk at a better angle toward the front door of the office and get rid of those over-sized palm trees in their huge bamboo containers. That's what "reorganization" meant to me.

To those more intelligent than I, "reorganization" meant "bankruptcy".

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Do a quickie-selfie on your memory. "Terminate with extreme prejudice." Do you remember what that meant? If you don't, then good! Somebody in Washington succeeded in blindfolding you through the ears. The expression was coined by our secret operatives in Vietnam, and it meant to assassinate someone, usually but not always an enemy, as I recall!

Every language develops an alternative language to avoid that very language. People don't "die" anymore. They "pass," but not quite like quarterback Tom Brady. Jails are probably something like "tabernacles of correction" by now, and I'm sure if left alone those "serving" in those tabernacles for forgery will become known as "extra-statutory graphic artists." Using language to dodge language isn't a new game. Skeezix (from "Gasoline Alley" in the comic pages of the 1940s) met a guy named Elmer who told him he was a "tonsorial artist." Skeezix thought he was rising in the cultural world until he learned that meant Elmer was a barber! So what's the big deal?

If everybody understood everything there'd be no big deal. However, such is no longer the case, and the result is downright dangerous. In the days before slippery-speak, we knew where we stood. We Americans knew we'd lost our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. After that we learned Bataan and Corregidor, our last two holdings in the Philippines, had fallen to the invading Japanese. Earlier we'd learned that France had fallen. I said fallen! Not "entered into existential forfeiture of belligerent capability"; fallen to the triumphant Nazi German invaders. Later we'd learn that Singapore had fallen to the victorious Japanese. Warsaw had fallen. So had Oslo, Copenhagen, The Hague, Brussels, Belgrade, Athens – all fallen.

Did you know that Yemen has now fallen? If yes, how did you know? Do you have a brother-in-law in the CIA, with a big mouth? You didn't learn that from the American government, nor from the media whose job description of bringing us the news seems to have slipped all the way down to disguising bad news by blacksmithery, hammering forth the narratives the administration prefers. Our media were once very good at reporting. They're now very good at stenography. I'd rather have the world's worst reporters in there with Josh Earnest than the world's best stenographers.

Before the fall of Yemen, we were told all about how proud Obama was of his fabulously successful handling of Yemen – the poster-boy worldwide for handling Arab allies in the war on terror. You were not told about the fall of Yemen. Old Nazi trick: The Nazi radio prepared a "Christmas Special" in 1942, bringing greetings to the homeland from German fighting men in the farthest reaches of the Nazi empire – North Cape, Norway, in the north, the French coast on the west, Tunisia in the south and Stalingrad in the east. Problem: Stalingrad was in Russian hands. That "greeting" was faked in a radio studio in Berlin.

We were told nothing about the fall of Yemen. We were told the American Embassy was evacuated and rebels had taken over the embassy cars and the Marines had "handed over their firearms and ammunition." But "fallen"? How could we know? National humiliation may be in Obama's historic legacy, but not his vocabulary.

Therefore, whosoever knows nothing about Yemen's fall knows nothing about this particular failure in Obama's foreign policy and/or Hillary's failure to either rescue the situation or call Obama out on it, leaving American voters totally unequipped to vote intelligently for president in 2016. America's Yemenite defeat in the south delights Iran, it goes so well with similar defeats in Iraq and Syria to the north. But you've got to KNOW all that. A defeat is a terrible thing to waste!

Briefly and bluntly, Hillary loses my vote merely for standing there smiling while Obama was giving himself and his administration such high marks for his Yemenite brilliance.

My math grades were terrible, but I've decided that's because those textbook equations were so far beneath me. I'm only good for the big stuff, like, "Concealing your most serious foreign policy failures and trusting Big Media to spray-deodorize all the rest and letting media portray the guilty as smiling innocents – that's your formula for destroying the greatest country in the world, in the history of the world or in the imagination of the most fertile thinkers in the world!"

Ignorance is the sperm of apathy. If you don't know, you can't care!

Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].