By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, February 13, 2014
The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell
novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" gave us the word
"Orwellian." That adjective reflects a vast government's efforts not
just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the
meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself.
America, of all places, is becoming Orwellian. The
president repeatedly reminds the American people that under his leadership, the
U.S. has produced a record level of new oil and natural gas. But didn't Obama
radically curtail leases for just such new energy production on federal lands?
Have the edicts on the barn wall of "Animal Farm" been changed again,
with the production of new oil and gas going from bad to suddenly good?
Does anyone remember that the Affordable Care Act was
sold on the premise that it would guarantee retention of existing health plans
and doctors, create 4 million new jobs and save families $2,500 a year in
premiums, all while extending expanded coverage to more people at a lower cost?
Only in Orwell's world of doublespeak could raising
taxes, while the costs of millions of health plans soars, be called
"affordable." Is losing your existing plan and doctor a way of
retaining them?
The Congressional Budget Office recently warned that
Obamacare would "keep hours worked and potential output during the next 10
years lower than they would be otherwise." That nonpartisan verdict should
be bad news for workers.
Not in our brave new world. The Obama administration says
it is pleased that workers will now be freed from "job lock." What is
job lock -- a made-up Newspeak word right out "1984"? Work fewer
hours, make less money and create fewer outputs -- and be happy.
About every January since 2009, the president has
promised to close Guantanamo Bay. Is the detention facility now sort of
virtually closed -- in the manner that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his
chemical weapons are now virtually gone, as Obama decreed years ago, and in the
manner that we are still hunting down the murderers in Benghazi who were
supposedly outraged over a video? Is there an Orwellian "memory hole"
where these embarrassing proclamations are disposed?
In 2004, many in the media reported that George W. Bush,
the demonized Emmanuel Goldstein of our era, had overseen a "jobless
recovery." Unemployment at election time in 2004 was 5.4 percent.
Yet since January 2009, only two months have seen
joblessness dip slightly below 7 percent. A record 90 million able-bodied
Americans are not participating in the workforce. Yet the president, in
Orwellian doublespeak fashion, recently claimed that the job picture is good.
If 5.4 percent unemployment was once called a jobless recovery, are we now in a
jobless recovery from a jobless recovery?
In 2013, the IRS confessed that it had targeted
particular political groups based on their names or political themes -- a Big
Brother intrusion into private lives that was revealed at about the same time
the Associated Press and National Security Agency eavesdropping scandals came
to light. During the initial media frenzy, President Obama blasted the
politicization of the IRS as "outrageous."
After the IRS was confirmed to be delaying the tax-exempt
requests of conservative groups at a far greater rate than their liberal
counterparts, the agency's director, Douglas Shulman, stepped down at the end
of his term. His replacement, acting commissioner Steven Miller, subsequently
resigned from the agency. And the IRS official in charge of tax-exempt
decisions, Lois Lerner, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against
self-incrimination before Congress. She and Joseph H. Grant, commissioner of
the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, both abruptly retired from the
IRS.
Congressional committees and the Treasury Inspector
General for Tax Administration found that groups loosely associated with the
Tea Party were more likely to have their tax-exempt requests put on hold than
other nonprofits. Yet recently, President Obama concluded of this entire mess
that it did not entail "even a smidgen of corruption."
It takes Orwell's doublethink to explain how a scandal
might have rated an "outrageous" before the people in charge quit,
retired or invoked the Fifth Amendment, and then, after their embarrassing
departures, was reinvented as an episode without a smidgen of corruption.
In politics, of course, left and right, conservative and
liberal, make up stuff. But Orwell, who also blasted the rise of European
fascism, focused more on the mind games of the statist Left.
Why? He apparently feared that the Left suffered an
additional wage of hypocrisy in more openly proclaiming the noble interests of
"the people." Because of those supposedly exalted ends of equality
and fairness, statists were more likely to get a pass from the media and public
for the scary means they employed to achieve them.
Right now in America, the words and deeds of both past
and present become reality only when the leaders put them in the correct
service of the people.
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