I was just rereading George Orwell’s 1984 in an attempt to catch up on current events, when sure enough, no sooner had I finished than I read this in the WP:

“President Bush vowed for the first time yesterday to turn over most of Iraq to newly trained Iraqi troops by the end of this year, setting a specific benchmark as he kicked off a fresh drive to reassure Americans alarmed by the recent burst of sectarian violence.

“Bush, who until now has resisted concrete timelines as the Iraq war dragged on longer than he expected, outlined the target in the first of a series of speeches intended to lay out his strategy for victory.”

Just like that -- a major policy change, seemingly, and it was dropped on the public as though nothing had changed at all.

Which takes us back to 1984, whose protagonist, Winston Smith, was a mid-level rewrite man for Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth.

Each day it was Winston’s job to reinvent modern history, to restate the present as though past to present were nonlinear, and, most pragmatically, to “correct” previously published Party versions of, say, industrial output statistics or the war’s progress with whatever version the Party now deemed more suitable for the news-consuming masses.

And the masses, according to the novel’s creator, “could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.”

Orwell called them the people, the proles, the members, the masses -- a globular lump of non-specific groupings. Today, however, we can be quite comfortably specific and call these sane few “The 36 Percent” -- those loyal numbers still capable of clinging to sanity only by questioning nothing at all, as long as it spews forth from the Party, aka the GOP.

Indeed, were you to read today of an unnamed man “of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom … the stability of the Party depend[s],” would your thoughts jump to an Orwell character or your neighbor who still sports a Bush-Cheney ’04 bumper sticker?