Tag: George Orwell

Jon Stewart asks Willard about his doublethink proposals: Are you a wizard…or a liar?

“I really didn’t say everything I said. […] Then again, I might have said ’em, but you never know.” – Yogi Berra

“I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.” –Mitt Romney, to Shawn of the Dead Hannity

It became obvious long ago that a fundamental component of the Romney campaign strategy is to spend a billion dollars fusing three of the most effective propaganda techniques ever devised by man: repetition, the Big Lie, and doublethink.

George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four provides some background:

“The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”

[…]

Definition of doublethink: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed….”

Not only has Merry-Go-Round-Now-Moderate-Mitt flip flopped on a plethora of issues, the latest being his position on abortion as he explained it to the Des Moines Register yesterday, but he lies unreMITTingly, not only about the Obama Administration’s record, but his own as well.

As has been said here and elsewhere many times, Willard will say anything to anyone at any time if he thinks it will move him one step closer to the White House. Last week’s debate is a prime example, with Romney telling a series of lies and propagating over two dozen “myths”  some of which  we documented here.

While the establishment media hasn’t been completely absent in noting some of his more egregious lies and flip flops, their record so far has been anemic, reflected in those polls that ask the public about their knowledge of, or more accurately, their level of confusion about specific issues. (The more common “horse race” polls also reflects this ignorance but to a lesser extant, given that they include subjective issues like a candidate’s “likability.”)

The big post-election question for the media is whether the Fourth Estate will live up to its structural responsibility for separating truth from fiction from downright lies. If it doesn’t, we will have completed the transition from the Walter Cronkite era, characterized by a non-profit, non-partisan approach to news and information; to the Rupert Murdoch era, where “news”– more accurately, “infotainment”– is merely the vehicle for propagating a larger corporatist agenda.

We begun and now end with a Yogi-ism that Willard has internalized to perfection, becoming its very embodiment:

When you come to a  fork in the road, take it.