Abramoff Arithmetic

Orwell foresaw the utter emptiness of today's ("Today's"?) pampered pundits all too clearly.

But it was necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley of feeling -- but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost -- struggled inside him.

The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:

2+2=5

'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you. 'What happens to you here is for ever,' O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

Impervious to facts, Katie Colic and the rest of the media talking heads (Pumpkinhead in particular) continue to spin the Abramoff scandal as a bipartisan affair. Having sold their souls for a Nantucket address and weekend dinners with Jack Welch, they have nothing left inside that can be reached by reasoned argument. The RNC says "2 + 2 = 5" and they nod like automatons in agreement.

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