Have you noticed how the funhouse mirror of America’s televised public discourse is becoming ever more twisted with odd doppelgangers and their reflected opposites often inhabiting adjacent thoughts or even single sentences?

Maybe you haven’t because, within the purposefully dense blather, you’re not supposed to notice.
For many, serious listening to what once was considered public policy and its debate creates a discombobulating mental motion sickness befuddlingly impervious to most forms of logical refutation.
Orwell came close to envisioning today’s sad state of twisty public talk but even at his most Orwellian that George failed to imagine the impenetrable mental white noise generated by today’s most rapid-fire Topsy-turvian and his array of neoconservative global enablers.
Just this morning America’s ambassador to accounting-free Iraq, without documentary evidence, assured his amiable and unquestioning General Electric interlocutor that $300 million vanished US dollars were not monies appropriated by the Congress:

My understanding is that these are Iraqi moneys that are involved, not United States government appropriated funds.

Then, later in the same alleged program, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, again without the program host’s self-proclaimed aggressive interlocution, fretted over the spending habits of dead, and I would assume former, Social Security recipients.

We need to look at the way seniors are allowed to use money in retirement and even after death.

I’m sure many online advocates will refute these claims and I wish them success.
I think, however, we’ve moved beyond Orwellian Doubleplusgood rhetoric to a place where refutation, more often than not, allows people to, in a favorite Bushian phrase, “get lost in the weeds”.
Take for example the topsy-turvian nature of this past week’s allegedly “soaring” Inaugural address.
On one hand “it is human choices that move events” but, then again, in the very next sentence “God [the “Author of Liberty”] moves and chooses as He wills.”
Despite Jefferson’s 1821 belief that “[It is] the people, to whom all authority belongs”, President Bush, last Thursday, said, “Self-government relies…in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people.”
While unremarked upon by inhabitants of the American media’s mirrored funhouse, the President is drifting from 200+ years of American orthodoxy to a new place deep in the metaphoric weed thicket where God is the creator of democracy and the people merely acolytes.
This newer and holier world order with the people subservient to a particular interpretation of Liberty’s Godhead bodes well for only the world’s most aggressive interpreters.
As we exit the funhouse this Sunday morning, dizzy with thoughts of freedom and slavery, our blurry eyes see only the weed-free path blessed by one man’s vision; a path some called God’s own but, to others, appears decidedly calf-like and suspiciously golden.

Also
1925-2005
Good night, Johnny.

Photo: Reuters

- posted by Sean @ 1:34 PM