Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, a retired rear admiral, recently said that during the long U.S. undertaking in Afghanistan “the goals did migrate over time.” Did the goals themselves have agency — minds of their own? Why do so many people, particularly in government, engage in such gaseous talk? Because it envelops in abstract, obfuscating vocabularies things that are awkward to defend.

President Joe Biden says the Taliban is “going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government.” Which is worse, if he means this, or if he doesn’t?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaims three musts: “Afghans and international citizens” who wish to leave Afghanistan “must” be allowed to. Roads, airports and border crossings “must remain open.” “Calm must be maintained.” “Must,” lest nice people frown? State Department spokesman Ned Price is pleased that the U.N. Security Council has asked the Taliban to create a government that is “united, inclusive, and representative, including with the full and meaningful participation of women.”

Nonsense from high officials is nothing new.

The economist Arthur Pigou wrote that “environments … as well as people, have children.” Today’s social environment is the child of decades of no-longer-new communications technologies. In an era of instant dissemination of words, there is a Gresham’s law of rhetoric: Bad drives out good. Hence the plague of pompous garrulousness — of officials insulting the public’s intelligence.

Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., said that historian Edward Gibbon detected a “leakage of reality” in the late Roman empire. Moynihan often used this phrase to denote Americans’ “seeming weakness at grasping the probable consequences of what we do or fail to do.” Often, however, it is worse than a weakness: It is a calculated effort.

Today’s stunning leakage is of prestige from government. Biden has exhorted congressional progressives to force the most comprehensive peacetime expansion of government in U.S. history. The grandiosity has two dimensions. One is government’s siphoning away of a hitherto unimaginable portion of society’s current and future fiscal resources. The other is a radical revision of the nation’s civic vocabulary by postulating, that disparities in social outcomes are evidence of the nation’s viciousness.

Suddenly the Afghanistan tragedy has become a powerful accelerant of the U.S. government’s prestige leakage.

Perhaps few 2022 voters will cast ballots with today’s scenes from Kabul’s airport on their minds.

But because of those mortifying scenes, a significant number of voters might have a more jaundiced view of government’s extravagant 2021 pretentions regarding its ability to rearrange the nation’s economy and transform its moral premises. And perhaps many will remember the government’s often self-serving and disgraceful rhetoric about Afghanistan.

Clement Attlee, Britain’s prime minister from 1945 to 1951, once told Harold Laski, chairman of Attlee’s Labour Party, that “a period of silence on your part would be welcome.” Biden should say that to some of his subordinates, and some of them would serve him by saying it to him.