From the novel by Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, pp 35, 176-177
"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
Does this remind you of a certain Political Party and President?
Doublethink seems to be the preferred method of madness for Dictatorships.
"Additionally, Doublethink's self-deception allowed the Party to maintain both huge goals and realistic expectations: "If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes" (page 177). Thus, each party member could be a credulous pawn, but would never lack relevant information. The party is both fanatical and well informed, and thus unlikely either to "ossify" or "grow soft" and collapse. "Killing the messenger" disturbed the command-and-control of the Nazi (and later the Iraqi) militaries, but would not present itself in such a system. Doublethink thus functioned as a key tool of self-discipline for the Party, to complement the state-imposed discipline of propaganda and a police state. Together, these tools hid the government's evil not only from the people, but also from the government itself, but without the confusion and misinformation associated with more primitive totalitarian regimes.
Doublethink was critical in allowing the Party to know what its true goals were without recoiling from them. Previous dictatorships made the mistake of conflating their egalitarian propaganda with their purpose; 1984 demonstrated that the next generation of dictatorship would not be so naïve." Wikipedia
Clearly there is a direct connection between the Presidents beliefs and Karol Rove'sGOP's spin on events, facts and moral convictions. This is where they enlist the propaganda machines of mainly Fox news and quite a bit of the other main stream media outlets. Everyone remembers the children singing in front of the White House about Katrina.
"Our country stood beside us
People have sent us aid.
Katrina could not stop us, our hopes will never fade.
Congress, Bush and FEMA
People across our land
together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!"
Thanks Think Progressive
Good God, I thought I was in Russia for a moment. That media stunt was purely propaganda and everyone who knows the facts called bullshit on that one. There is truth in that broadcast; which is: we have decayed as a Republic Democracy to the point where our government is able to conduct such obvious propaganda on the masses and we just laugh it off and weren't outraged by the lies they where singing! I was listening to Alex Jones last night and he described how Fox News smiles and is upbeat when talking about Bush and the Gopers; however the Dems are represented with frowns and body language that shy you away from them. How does that old saying go? Actions speak louder then words. I have had the chance to observe it yet but I'm planning too.
I heard the term "Citizens Media" is starting to pop up in the Blogs and on radio thanks to the Majority Report. I think this new Citizens Media a.k.a. Blogs is our way to beat the Corporate Media at their own game. If of the 100,000 members of Daily Kos can pull their advertisement from the main stream and use Blogs and News emails and start seriously cutting into the profits of the Corporate media, the bottom line will speak very loud in getting "Them" to change their ways. We are having an affect! I believe there was an apology for the "Al Qaeda Candidate" remark toward Lamont.
I think we should start an infowar, seriously an all out attack on the Corporate Media with Facts and correcting their reporting. Media Matters is an excellent place to reverb false reports. We should create a label for our Post's that are uniform across the bloggosphere(I hope I spelled that right).
Example:
InfoWar: CNN Lied about this
Facts Corrected: Fox News Misreports
Corrections: something something
Something along those, lines hammering them from here until Election and after! I like how everyone uses the State abbreviations' for elections information. Let's standardize the correcting of Misinformation and get that standard adopted across all Blogs.
I'm done and feel much better now that I got that off my chest!