Who is Big Brother?

Big Brother's Minister of Truth

Frank Luntz - conservative political consultant and pollster

Much as he did to help the "Party of No" fight health care reform, Republican strategist Frank Luntz has penned a memo outlining a strategy to defeat the financial reform efforts of the Obama administration.

His plan? Lie!

Say that the proposed legislation is not reform, but that it is a bailout for big banks and lobbyists which you oppose.

Framing positive legislation as a negative in this way allows those who oppose reform to gain the unwitting support of the people who most desire it.

As the self-proclaimed opponents of big government, Republicans are both in fact and in deed the embodiment of George Orwell's Big Brother. Following Luntz's advice, they worked tirelessly to convince the American people that health care reform was socialism and to sidetrack meaningful debate on the issue by encouraging tirades by teabaggers against "death panels," rationing, and coverage for undocumented immigrants, none of which are in the proposed legislation.

Republicans do this in an attempt to regain political power, which they have openly stated they would use to reinstitute the failed and pernicious policies of the previous administration. Those policies turned surplus into debt, patriotism into profiteering, and international good will into an excuse for launching an unnecessary war. All this and more the Republicans did while claiming to be morally and patriotically superior to those who attempted to speak truth to their lies.

Big Brother cannot survive where lies can be openly refuted by an educated populace. Thus it becomes necessary for the GOP to foster ignorance and to attack educated opponents as subversive, arrogant elitists who are out of touch with "the real world." Of course, it is nearly impossible for any political party to implement such an ambitious and malevolent agenda without help from the media.

Enter FOX News, the GOP's partner in fostering and promoting the dumbing down of America.

FOX airs a steady diet of the same verbal subterfuge outlined by Luntz round-the-clock and calls it journalism.

On January 29, President Obama spoke and then answered questions at the House Republicans Caucus in Baltimore. During the question and answer session, FOX cut away from the live coverage when it became apparent that the President was delivering an ass-whuppin' to 140 sound-bite spouting legislators playing fast and loose with the facts. This allowed the FOX "reporters" to spin the story into one more in keeping with the network's ideologically driven agenda.



To emphasize that point, it is worth noting that after the question and answer session ended, FOX went live to broadcast the entire Republican response without interruption. So much for "fair and balanced" news.

"WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

Long live Big Brother!

That's the bad news.

But there's good news as well.

For more than a decade, the constant barrage of misleading statements and outright lies made by Big Brother  through his Ministry of Truth went unchallenged. Today, folks appear to be realizing how they were duped, and moderates like Jerry Remmers are speaking out against such duplicity in articles like this: An Easy Expose of GOP Strategy

George Orwell would be happy. After all, his purpose in writing "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was to warn us about men like Frank Luntz, not to praise them.