The Politics of Integrity

Recently I have caught myself thinking a lot about George Orwell’s satire Animal Farm and his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. That seems to be especially true in relation to the current debate on Bush’s tax cuts. What I am wondering is why we are debating the tax cuts at all? The cuts were bad when Bush introduced them and they’re bad now. Why can’t we let them expire and introduce a new tax policy that makes sense? Change doesn’t mean keeping the same economic policy of the previous administration. Nor does it mean keeping the same economic stewards (Bernanke and Geithner), or fighting in the same wars, or keeping the same head of defense. And change doesn’t mean replacing our troops with private soldiers in Iraq and calling it a withdrawal. Orwell used terms like ‘newspeak’, ‘oldspeak’ and ‘doublethink’ to describe the craziness he saw in governments in his day. Others called it ‘doublespeak’. We used to call it lies. Now we don’t call it anything.