Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

The only entities directly regulated by Waxman-Markey would be the electric utilities, oil refiners, natural gas producers, and some manufacturers that produce energy on site.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite [to change the term limits law], the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. [Hugo] Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

Iran's government is not a true democracy but a theocratic dictatorship that cloaks the rule of the ayatollahs with a façade of representative government. The clerical regime hand-picked the four contending candidates from a pool of 475 who initially sought to run for the presidency. The senior clerics on the Guardian Council, which vets the candidates, severely narrowed the choices to less than 1 percent of the original field of challengers. The four who were permitted to run for the presidency share a deep commitment to the extremist Islamist ideology that sparked Iran's 1979 revolution.

Yet 1984 does have lessons beyond the totalitarian experience. Take the book's definition of "doublethink," the ideal mental state of the citizen of Orwell's dystopia: it is "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them," the ability "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."

It is not just governments—democratic or not—that engage in a less extreme version of such mental gymnastics. It's activists of all stripes; talk show hosts and pundits across the political spectrum; and, finally, ordinary people.

The same is true of "newspeak," terminology invented to shade the real meaning of certain beliefs or acts and make them more appealing. (Even such popular terms as "pro-choice" for "pro-abortion rights" and "pro-life" for "anti-abortion" have overtones of newspeak.)

[A] daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting The Party's enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them and the principles of democracy.

The film and its accompanying auditory and visual cues (which include a grinding noise that Orwell describes as "of some monstrous machine running without oil") are a form of brainwashing to Party members, attempting to whip them into a frenzy of hatred and loathing for Emmanuel Goldstein and the current enemy superstate...The film becomes more surreal as it progresses, with Goldstein's face morphing into a sheep as enemy soldiers advance on the viewers, before one such soldier charges at the screen, machine gun blazing. He morphs, finally, into the face of Big Brother at the end of the two minutes.

Another pervasive feature of the Orwellian state was the practice of constantly whipping up hatred toward the ideological enemy du jour. Looking at much of our political discourse today, from right-wing talk radio to left-wing blogs, it's hard not to think of such rituals as "Two-Minute Hate" and "Hate Week." On too many political websites, every week is Hate Week—whether the object of hate is liberals, Muslims, neocons, or Christian bigots. Partisan propagandists and professional hate-mongers bear a large share of the blame, but so do "regular" people who need little encouragement to demonize political opponents.

There’s a difference between selling out your ideas, and selling your ideas. And the British National Party isn’t about selling out its ideas ... but we are determined now to sell them. And that means basically to use the saleable words. As I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them, nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas. They are saleable.

Perhaps one day, once by being rather more subtle we’ve got ourselves in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, “Yes, every last one must go.” Perhaps they will one day, but if you offer that as your sole aim to start with, you’re gonna get absolutely nowhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic behaviour" means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practice, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
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Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic.

Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.

The religious aspect. This is important, because it’s something that the loony left doesn’t understand (along with almost everything else). “How can you not feel bad about this man being murdered while at the same time insisting that his murderer is a murderer?” Simple, really. Tiller’s murderer violated a law of man, and by that he must be judged here on Earth, as I hope and expect that he will be. But Tiller also violated the Laws of G-d, and therefore I cannot feel bad about him being a recipient of “what goes around, comes around.” It is improper, however, for man to take it upon himself to enforce the Laws of G-d, only G-d has that prerogative, and Tiller’s murderer, no matter how much I feel that this world is a cleaner place because Tiller has been removed from it, did just that. For that he will answer, just as Tiller will answer for his sins.

That quote by Michelle Malkin that you posted describing the killing of Tiller as "terrorism" wasn't by Michelle. It was a quote from a post on some other blog and she linked to Google. She didn't call it terrorism. In fact, she was basically pulling the "oh NOW the left uses the word 'terrorism'" card. Just didn't want you giving her credit for something she didn't actually do.

"Late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down at his church in Kansas Sunday morning in a thoroughly evil, cold-blooded act of domestic terrorism. Yes, terrorism. Not 'extremism,'"

Interesting how the t-word has been rediscovered.

"for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe."

But as we’ve shown here at LGF, Roeder also posted comments at anti-abortion websites, subscribed to anti-abortion magazines (including one that advocated the murder of doctors who perform abortions), and when he was arrested he had a Post-It note in his car containing the phone number of Operation Rescue. Exactly how do you qualify to have “connections to the pro-life” movement, if this doesn’t do it?

Note to anti-abortion groups: man up and take responsibility for Scott Roeder. He’s one of yours. Obviously, not everyone who belongs to a “pro-life” group will go to such extreme lengths as Scott Roeder apparently did, but it’s long past time for you folks to start dialing down the rhetoric and acting more responsibly — before anyone else is hurt or killed in a shooting or an abortion clinic bombing.

And if you don’t believe this is necessary, here’s a video created by Operation Rescue. The apparent purpose of the video: to encourage the murder of Dr. George Tiller. At one point, an onscreen message says: “Together We Can Put An End To George Tiller, Abortion and These Horrific Crimes”