Bush Repeats pre-Iraq War Speech from 2003 (or 1984...?)

Read George Orwell's 1984 (or even Gregory Maguire's Wicked) and the structure of George W. Bush's speech about "The Bailout" should sound chillingly familiar... even if it were not for the fact that we heard the same speech 5 years ago.

The books illustrate it in much greater depth, but Jon Stewart demonstrates it a bit more humorously:


It's as if our administration has used Orwell's classic about using war and the economy to control the populace as it's grand strategy:

"The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world... In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population...

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses to comfortable, and hence, in the long run too intelligent...

"War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way... All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously... All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake... Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."