Distinction without a difference

Erin is right to question Doug Elliott's attempt to split hairs between a "slowdown" and a "deceleration". But Elliott's parsing ranks a distant second behind Russ Marchuk in the field of evasive dissembling.

Shorter Marchuk:

It's outrageous that anybody would suggest we're imposing a disastrous policy like universal standardized testing on students. Instead, our policy is one of (flips through thesaurus) unified province-wide (flipflipflip) regular (flipflip) assessments for individual pupils. Which I'm sure you can see is something totally different.