It is refreshing that Bush is not taking all of his ideas from George Orwell but has also been taking some guidance from Lewis Carroll.
Numerous books have been written on the way that George W. Bush mangles the poor English language. Is Our Children Learning, by its title alone, suggests as much and Pardon the President: A Graphic Guide to George W. Bush's Quips & Quotes goes into numerous more specific quotes. By no means is this an exhaustive bibliography on the topic.
Views differ on whether his frequent malapropisms are simply an act, meant to endear him with the voters (who are viewed largely as being very much as illiterate as the President seems) or whether this quite real, a manifestation of the Presidential learning disability. There are too many variations on these interpretations to even attempt to catalog them, though that might make for an interesting masters thesis for someone to write.
But my topic is not the peculiar miss-steps of the executive tongue, but more the administration's deliberate corruption of the English language. It is neither clear nor important whether this is the work of Bush himself (on the theory that he is, politically, an idiot savant) or the work of someone like Karl Rove who (unlike those of the Bush clan) has that vision thing. What is clear is that the Bush Administration long ago launched a devastatingly successful war on the English language.
Ah war! The force that gives us meaning. I abused the literal meaning of the word myself, just as Ronald Regan did with his war on drugs and as Lyndon Johnson did with his war on poverty. The G.W. Bush Administration carried the abuse much further, though. Neither the war on poverty nor the war on drugs involved dropping bombs (O.K., maybe Regan dropped a few small bombs in Columbia in his war on drugs) and certainly the War on Words is metaphorical. These were not real wars - but George seems to have missed this subtlety.
George is a pretty down-to-earth literal kind of guy. He does not think of the War on Terror as a metaphorical war the way most people would. He called out the National Guard and sent in tanks and troops. We are a country at war and he is a war-time President with extraordinary wartime powers. People are getting killed in this peculiar war on a defenseless abstract noun.
The Bush administration has not only re-defined the word war (it used to mean an armed conflict between nations) but he has felt free to drastically re-define the word torture and the word law (now it means whatever the President wants it to mean at any given time). The word, people, has become more restricted in its meaning than it used to be because enemy combatants are no longer included in its scope - and an enemy combatant is anyone the President designates as an enemy combatant. To be an enemy combatant it is not necessary to be either an enemy or a combatant. Democracy used to describe a political system in which all the people rule, but under G.W. Bush the people who rule a democracy have become only an elite few (chosen perhaps because of their wealth or parents?).
When Alice met Humpty Dumpty (in Through the Looking Glass) he told her that when he used words they meant exactly what he wanted them to mean, no more and no less. G.W. Humpty Dumpty Bush seems to hold to this same notion but we have to ponder whether he is due for a great fall.