This latest Newspeak push by the administration, to purge the term "private" or "private account" from the news and from the records, and pretend that it was ALWAYS "personal" should provide compelling proof that the label "Orwellian" is not just hysterical whining, or poetic allusion.

"The President has always referred to personal accounts, but some often mischaracterize them as 'private accounts.'" – Treasury Secretary John Snow, 2/3/05

Now, Winston, the trick of Newspeak is you must also be able to read:

"I believe younger workers ought to be able to take some of their own money, set aside…a private account that they can call their own, a private account they can pass on to the next generation and a private account that Government can't take away." – President Bush, 9/14/04

and be able to believe them both at the same time... Right before you put the second one into the incinerator, and forget it ever existed. Because it didn't.

This is more than a simple semantic quibble- it is illustrative of a point and a tactic used by this administration over and over again. A willful gainsaying of demonstrable, documented statements, enforced by vengeful and coercive tactics to ensure that whatever they are saying now is not only reality, but has always been reality. That is the definition of tyranny.

Freedom is the freedom to say 2 + 2 = 4. This administration has organized a very complex media machine to take away that right. Facts do not matter, previous statements do not matter, and may or may not have ever existed. To suggest otherwise is to be disloyal or part of a "fringe, loony left."

This administration is evil, and if we are crying wolf, it is because we are being mauled by a wolf.

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. 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.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. George Orwell-1984

See how that jibes with...

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," NYT Magazine

Orwellian. Evil.