Orwell gets his due
The Raw Story | Reid fires back at Bush: 'The president has been giving us doublespeak for years'
Watching the video earlier, I was reminded of another lesson from college, this one taken from George Orwell and his book, 1984.Technorati Tags: Orwell, Bush, Reid, SOTU, doublespeak, newspeak
In that book, Orwell spoke of “doublespeak” - naming something just the opposite, in order to cover how unpleasant it is in reality.
As we saw in the video, the President has been giving us doublespeak for years. He utters platitudes about helping Americans, when he’s really helping his special interest friends.
When he wanted to let energy companies release more pollution into the air, he called it the “Clear Skies Initiative.”
When he wanted to give tax breaks to his special interest friends – even though it meant adding more than $50 billion to the deficit, he called it the “Deficit Reduction Act.”
His “Leave No Child Behind Act” is leaving children behind every day because he refuses to fund it. And his new Medicare drug benefit hardly resembles a “benefit” for seniors.
Tuesday night, it is time for President Bush to end this pattern of deceit. In his State of the Union, it is not enough for him to declare that the “state of our union is strong.”
[snip]Just over four years ago, Osama Bin Laden attacked America and took 3,000 lives. The President said at the time that he wanted Bin Laden “dead or alive.”
But four years later, Bin Laden is still on the loose and continues to threaten America. Meanwhile, the number of terrorist attacks across the world has increased, and we now face the risk that Iraq will become what it was not before the war: a haven and launching pad for international terrorism.
Four years ago, the President declared Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “axis of evil,” whose nuclear threats we needed to preemptively strike.
But four years… 23 hundred American lives… and more than 250 billion dollars later, we have found that Iraq had no nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the problem of Iran has been outsourced to Europeans, and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has likely quadrupled.
Four years ago , the President said in his State of the Union: “America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity” which include the “the rule of law.”
But four years later, we’ve heard that the President has ignored the rule of law in order to spy on Americans. We’ve also found that the White House given the green light to torture, even though it violated our laws and made our troops less safe.
