1984 is 20 Years Late

What's King George's last name? It's Bush right?

Because the more facts that come out, the more he sounds like an apparatchik out of an Orwellian nightmare.

I mean it's not what he does to language accidentally through his oral dyslexia (or is it linguistic dyspepsia?), which, while funny, is relatively harmless. What's really frightening is his sustained belief that by saying up is down often enough, people will believe that's the case. Well that's not frightening so much as the idea that it might work, that enough voters will suspend disbelief to re-elect Bush even though he simply doesn't trust them and won't level with them.

So, we learn from Duelfer's report that Iraq had no capability to build WMD's after 1994, much less have any WMD's in their possession. We learn that Bush's whole original rationale for going to war never existed. Remember when he addressed the nation and described the threat as imminent and said we could not wait for more inspections? Here's how the New York Times covers it:

Mr. Duelfer's 900-page report concluded that contrary to Bush administration's assertions on the eve of war, the Hussein regime had rid itself of chemical and biological weapons, nor was it well on the way to having nuclear weapons.

Today, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney seemed to embrace other findings by Mr. Duelfer, that Mr. Hussein planned to reconstitute his military's deadly-weapons capabilities once United Nations sanctions on him were lifted, and that he was constantly scheming to skirt those sanctions.
http://nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/campaign/07CND-BUSH.html?

Sigh. I see. A plan to reconstitute deadly weapons, which couldn't be started until sanctions were lifted, that was the clear and present danger that justified rushing into an ill-planned war, turning attention from Afghanistan, and generating even more Muslim anger that's helped make terrorism a more noble sacrifice.

Gross incompetence is one thing, but incompetence and this shifting of reasons slathered in a campaign of systematic denial that things were ever different from what Bush says they are today, when the evidence is so clear that things are different, is gobsmackingly outrageous. How can we elect a president who lacks the courage to level with America?

That we still might is just frightening.