Groupthink

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

— George Orwell, 1984

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It’s difficult to find somebody who will argue that Vice President Dick Cheney is a nice guy. He was never a popular individual to begin with, and over the last six years he has also acquired more of a reputation as, well, an asshole. But we may have just seen an example of the man’s true colors, something that should serve as a warning to us all.

Vice President Cheney just returned from a trip to Pakistan and other points in south-central Asia to address issues of security and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Vice President travels on his own plane, and has the requisite compliment of press accompanying him on his journeys, including this one. Usually the press uses these lengthy jaunts to get their interviews, write their stories, and do their reporter things.

Many times they get the opportunity to speak to the Vice President, either in the form of a question-answer session or an outright interview. On this trip they were disappointed that they were unable to speak to him.

Or at least, that’s all they were able to tell you.

The press were able to speak, instead, to a “senior government official.” When they did so, here was the first sentence out of his mouth:

“The reason the president wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.”

Now, you know they were talking to Dick Cheney. I know they were talking to Dick Cheney. Anybody with two IQ points to rub together knows that they were talking to Dick Cheney. But Mr. Cheney refused to allow the reporters to quote him as himself, only as a “senior government official”.

What is going on with this guy?

And it doesn’t end there. Surely 24 hours and some time to see just how ridiculous the situation is would bring a normal, sane, courteous, responsible human being to change course and allow the press, who are going to find a way to do it anyhow (as evidenced by the fact that this has been reported on, oh, 90% of the media outlets in the free world), to attribute the quote accurately.

But no! During the February 28th White House press conference reporters asked Communications Director Tony Snow about the situation. He gave the following reply:

“I have spoken with the Vice President’s office, and the ground rules that were laid out are going to remain in effect.”

What can we glean from this? Vice President Dick Cheney is a fascist.

It’s obvious that the way to tell if Dick Cheney is lying is if his lips are moving. The man apparently is such a liar and such a control freak that he won’t even allow our free press, the guardians of freedom and the most critical check on abuses of power in our executive branch of government, to report what he says. He’s so paranoid, so determined to manipulate the things that the American people see, hear, read, and think, that he is enlisting the help of the media to try to convince us that the things that came out of his mouth didn’t really come out of his mouth.

Who controls the present controls the past.

So now we think back to all the other times we have read quotes attributed to a “senior government official”. Who were those people? How many of them were Cheney or President Bush (who has, no doubt, picked up the trick from his surrogate Daddy) disguising their comments as having come from one of their lackeys? What would they have said if they were speaking as themselves?

And most importantly, what truths are they withholding from us while engaging in this charade, and what lies are they feeding to us as they hide behind the mask of unnamed sources?

Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, domestic terror threats, the Patriot Act, wiretapping of American citizens, enemy combatant detention at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe, prisoner abuse in Iraqi jails, covert military operations in non-combatant countries, the list of subjects on which we may have been subjected to deceit, half-truths and outright lies is staggering.

And why stop there? There are innumerable other issues away from the current conflicts that may have fallen under the umbrella of the Vice President’s practices of groupthink. Hurricane Katrina, health care, taxes, energy, the economy, the environment, Supreme Court justice nominees, the government has had their hand in a million things. The Vice President has been there all the time, invisibly holding the strings on the marionette who is President Bush, and feeding the American public a load of crap to cover his tracks.

Who controls the past controls the future.

Wake up, people. We’ve been taken for a ride. We need an FBI incursion into the White House to seal off the building, nothing and nobody in our out. Obtain every file, every memo, every letter, every computer hard drive, every video and audio tape, every shred of documentation of what this administration has been doing without our knowledge or consent.

Only then will we know the full scope of what this puppeteer has been up to for the last 6 years.