The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels\u00a01984<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Animal Farm<\/em>\u00a0gave<\/p>\n America, of all places, is becoming Orwellian. The president repeatedly reminds the American people that under his leadership, the U.S. has produced a record level of new oil and natural gas. But didn\u2019t Obama radically curtail leases for just such new energy production on federal lands? Have the edicts on the barn wall ofAnimal Farm<\/em>\u00a0been changed again, with the production of new oil and gas suddenly going from bad to good?<\/p>\n Does anyone remember that the Affordable Care Act was sold on the premise that it would guarantee retention of existing health plans and doctors, create 4 million new jobs, and save families $2,500 a year in premiums, all while extending expanded coverage to more people at a lower cost?<\/p>\n Only in Orwell\u2019s world of doublespeak could raising taxes, while the costs of millions of health plans soars, be called \u201caffordable.\u201d Is losing your existing plan and doctor a way of retaining them?\u00a0<\/p>\n The Congressional Budget Office recently warned that Obamacare would \u201ckeep hours worked and potential output during the next 10 years lower than they would be otherwise.\u201d That nonpartisan verdict should be bad news for workers.<\/p>\n Not in our brave new world. The Obama administration says it is pleased that workers will now be freed from \u201cjob lock.\u201d What is job lock \u2014 a made-up Newspeak word right out of\u00a01984<\/em>? Work fewer hours, make less money, and create fewer outputs \u2014 and be happy.<\/p>\n About every January since 2009, the president has promised to close Guantanamo Bay. Is the detention facility now sort of virtually closed \u2014 in the manner that Syrian president Bashar Assad and his chemical weapons are now virtually gone as Obama decreed years ago, and in the manner that we are still hunting down the murderers in Benghazi who were supposedly outraged over a video? Is there an Orwellian \u201cmemory hole\u201d where these embarrassing proclamations are disposed?<\/p>\n In 2004, many in the media reported that George W. Bush, the demonized Emmanuel Goldstein of our era, had overseen a \u201cjobless recovery.\u201d Unemployment at election time in 2004 was 5.4 percent.<\/p>\n Yet since January 2009, only two months have seen joblessness dip slightly below 7 percent. A record 90 million able-bodied Americans are not participating in the workforce. Yet the president, in Orwellian doublespeak fashion, recently claimed that the job picture is good. If 5.4 percent unemployment was once called a jobless recovery, are we now in a jobless recovery from a jobless recovery?<\/p>\n In 2013, the IRS confessed that it had targeted particular political groups based on their names or political themes \u2014 a Big Brother intrusion into private lives that was revealed at about the same time the Associated Press and National Security Agency eavesdropping scandals came to light. During the initial media frenzy, President Obama blasted the politicization of the IRS as \u201coutrageous.\u201d<\/p>\n After the IRS was confirmed to be delaying the tax-exempt requests of conservative groups at a far greater rate than their liberal counterparts, the agency\u2019s director, Douglas Shulman, stepped down at the end of his term. His replacement, acting commissioner Steven Miller, subsequently resigned from the agency. And the IRS official in charge of tax-exempt decisions, Lois Lerner, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before Congress. She and Joseph H. Grant, commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, both abruptly retired from the IRS.<\/p>\n Congressional committees and the treasury inspector general for tax administration found that groups loosely associated with the Tea Party were more likely to have their tax-exempt requests put on hold than other nonprofits. Yet recently, President Obama concluded of this entire mess that it did not entail \u201ceven a smidgen of corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n It takes Orwell\u2019s doublethink to explain how a scandal might have rated an \u201coutrageous\u201d before the people in charge quit, retired, or invoked the Fifth Amendment, and then, after their embarrassing departures, was reinvented as an episode without a smidgen of corruption.<\/p>\n In politics, of course, Left and Right, conservative and liberal, make up stuff. But Orwell, who also blasted the rise of European fascism, focused more on the mind games of the statist Left.<\/p>\n Why? He apparently feared that the Left suffered an additional wage of hypocrisy in more openly proclaiming the noble interests of \u201cthe people.\u201d Because of those supposedly exalted ends of equality and fairness, statists were more likely to get a pass from the media and public for the scary means they employed to achieve them.<\/p>\n Right now in America, the words and deeds of both past and present become reality only when the leaders put them in the correct service of the people.<\/p>\n Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.<\/em>\u00a0His latest book is<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a><\/span>,\u00a0published this spring by<\/em>\u00a0Bloomsbury Books.<\/em>\u00a0You can reach him by e-mailing\u00a0<\/em>author@victorhanson.com<\/a><\/em>. <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a9 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The meaning of works, and history itself, are malleable when it comes to our president and his record. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels\u00a01984\u00a0and\u00a0Animal Farm\u00a0gave us the word \u201cOrwellian.\u201d That adjective reflects a vast government\u2019s efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[536],"tags":[12,620,293,357,324,726,88,40,527,1052],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1P3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9668,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/america-as-animal-farm\/","url_meta":{"origin":7009,"position":0},"title":"America as Animal Farm","author":"Megan Ring","date":"December 14, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review New commandments replace the old ones on the barn wall. The socialist essayist and novelist George Orwell by 1944 grew depressed that as a cost for the defeat of the Axis Powers the Allies had empowered an equally nightmarish monster in the Soviet Union.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2345,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-road-to-oceania\/","url_meta":{"origin":7009,"position":1},"title":"Our Road to Oceania","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In George Orwell's allegorical novel\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four, the picture of \"Big Brother\" appears constantly in the adoring media. Perceived enemies are everywhere \u2014 supposedly plotting to undo the benevolent egalitarianism of Big Brother. Citizens assemble each morning to scream hatred for two minutes at\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2009"","block_context":{"text":"August 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/august-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":149,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-orientalism-of-barack-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":7009,"position":2},"title":"The Orientalism of Barack Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review Of course the documentary movie,\u00a02016: Obama's America, was timed by the conservative, Dinesh D'Souza, to discredit the president. Nonetheless, there can't be much doubt that the president's vision of America is driven by his attitude toward the perceived sins of European colonialism and his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3107,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/imprecise-language-breeds-dangerous-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7009,"position":3},"title":"Imprecise Language Breeds Dangerous Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society In his classic essay \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d George Orwell identified a \u201clack of precision\u201d as the besetting sin of politicized writing, either through incompetence or indifference as to whether \u201cwords mean anything or not.\u201d The liberal media have illustrated the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1778,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-reset-reset-foreign-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7009,"position":4},"title":"Our Reset Reset Foreign Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Almost every element of Barack Obama's once-heralded new \"reset\" foreign policy of a year ago has either been reset or likely soon will be. Consider Obama's approach to the 8-year-old war on terror. Plans made more than a year ago to shut down\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2010"","block_context":{"text":"March 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/march-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2632,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/thoughts-on-america-and-iran\/","url_meta":{"origin":7009,"position":5},"title":"Thoughts on America and Iran","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 24, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Thugophilia Isn't Moral I think we are going to see, incrementally, perhaps, a rise in the ratings of former president Bush.Iraq is proving to be amazingly resilient, not only functioning as a democracy, but by withstanding the best efforts of Iran to kill it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2009"","block_context":{"text":"June 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/june-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7009"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7011,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7009\/revisions\/7011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"AnimalFarm_1stEd\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/AnimalFarm_1stEd.jpg?resize=204%2C300&ssl=1\")
<\/a>us the word \u201cOrwellian.\u201d That adjective reflects a vast government\u2019s efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself.<\/p>\n