Thursday, January 30, 2003

It's a Newspeak kind of week

Via the Daily Howler, this story in the Washington Post was noteworthy:

Medicare Plan Short On Details

A day after his State of the Union address, President Bush took his agenda for the year on the road, starting with ambitious and expensive changes to Medicare. But the White House remained conspicuously silent about exactly how it wants to redesign the insurance program for the elderly even as the president traveled to the Midwest to begin selling the idea.

In reality, there is no plan. My, isn't that bold!

Which leads us to the underlying message:

Empty rhetoric makes a viable plan.

Brings to mind our war plan.

But mostly, it brings to mind this passage:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

No comments: