Obama's Orwellian Language

War Of Words: Politicians of every stripe have long known that controlling the language of political conflict wins half the battle. The president cannot be allowed to misrepresent his record of fiscal irresponsibility.

Two years before writing "1984," George Orwell wrote an essay titled "Politics and the English Language." World War II had just ended and this British socialist with no utopian misconceptions about Josef Stalin's Soviet totalitarianism to the east believed that "the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."

In "1984," the great warning novel of a dark future where the party has total authority over society, Orwell showed how a regime can control people through the perversion of words. Engraved on the wall of the mythical Oceania's "Ministry of Truth" are the slogans "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength."

A new slogan can now be added to that wall: "Spending is Investment."

Orwell pointed out that "political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Sad to say, a great deal of the wind delivered by President Obama in his State of the Union address contained little solid factual analysis. His call to extend the gimmicky partial freeze on a fraction of discretionary domestic spending and cut the Pentagon budget by nearly $80 billion amounts to a soggy Band-Aid applied to a hemorrhage.

It was a year ago, in the last State of the Union address, that the president called for some fiscal discipline in a small portion of the federal budget and increased transparency on congressional earmarks — while simultaneously adding $70 billion in new federal spending, or "investment," as the president Orwellianishly calls his big spending.

This time around, with the irritation of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the president is defiantly proposing more of the same — spending increases for education, energy and infrastructure on top of the already massive spikes in spending on those areas that have already taken place on his watch.

These are, of course, not investments. They are "simply an argument for bigger government," as Keith Hennessey, chief of the White House National Economic Council during the George W. Bush administration, noted when he reviewed Obama's speech on "investment" at Carnegie-Mellon University last June.

In that lecture, Obama described the GOP's vision as one in which "government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges ... the last administration called this recycled idea 'The Ownership Society.'"

But it was this president and the Democratic Congress that agreed to spend trillions on a taxpayer-financed stimulus that didn't stimulate job growth, and pushed health care "reform" in which the federal regulatory behemoth takes over the private health insurance industry and sends insurance premiums skyrocketing when the promise was that they would be brought down.

The "investment" the president touted Tuesday night is the opposite of true investment. It is Uncle Sam maxing out all of his unborn nieces' and nephews' credit cards in exchange for a one-way ticket to the poorhouse, a destination that is getting closer.