How prescient was Orwell's "doublethink"??

As Maureen Dowd puts it in her Oct. 25 column:

Things have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush. The president is cutting and running from the president.

You’d need a divining rod to make sense of the administration’s recent clarification of their Iraq policy. It goes something like this: we are not staying the course on staying the course because, if we stay the course on staying the course, people will think we’re staying the course and we want Americans to know that we’re not really staying the course, and that we weren’t staying the course all along – we just said we were (again and again and again).

As Dowd puts it (and others have commented long before this month):

Of course, the administration has never really said what “the course” is, so it was never really apparent what “staying” it meant, anyhow.

I’m not in the Keith Olbermann fan club or anything (I know I was praising him the other day), but watch this (via Crooks and Liars) for a montage of Bush’s now-abandoned “message” and a good chuckle, and then shake your head in disbelief when you follow it up with this.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, “doublethink” is defined and includes the following:

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…

Sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four just might be Rove’s bible.