Politics and the Obama Language

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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.

— George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946.

The president was not through reinventing history. If Obama spoke untruths on more than 20 occasions in selling Obamacare, he also made a post facto attempt to sneak a qualifier into his serial false promises: “What we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

But there is no record that Obama or his lieutenants had ever publicly said such a thing. The president’s attempt to airbrush history is similar to the commandments on the barn wall in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. One day the commandment “All animals are equal” mysteriously appears rewritten with a new qualifier beside it, as if it had been there all along: “All animals are equal — but some animals are more equal than others.”

The New York Times — which not long ago gave us the new term “white Hispanic,” to deemphasize the minority status of George Zimmerman in the Travyon Martin case — is also guilty of Obamacare-speak. The Times rebranded Obama’s untruths about Obamacare by simply declaring that Obama “clearly misspoke.” Does the Times think a real-estate agent “misspeaks” when he sells a two-bedroom house by falsely assuring that it is a three-bedroom home?

— Victor Davis Hanson, “Obamacare-Speak,” today.

And of course, to further obfuscate the language, none dare call it Obamacare — when it’s failing:

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Related: If you like your doctor, you can’t necessarily keep your doctor. And a College Kos Kid gets mugged by reality:

A liberal blogger and representative on the health care committee at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), turned to the liberal blog The Daily Kos, on Monday to decry the negative impact he says President Barack Obama’s signature health care law is having on grad students at his Ivy League school.

“For us, at least in the college health insurance market, the ACA has truly been the ‘law of unintended consequences,’ wrote Michael Convente on The Daily Kos, on Monday.

“Unintended” — you use that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.

And speaking of getting mugged by reality, Time-Warner-CNN-HBO removes the blinders — at least temporarily:

Hey, remember in 2011, when Time magazine was comparing Mr. Obama to President Reagan?