Joe Biden's Bibble-Babble

Washington -- The fabulists who are covering President Joe Biden for the mainstream media have spoken. He has gotten off to a flawless start. His first week was unsurpassed even by Warren Gamaliel Harding back in the 1920s. Warren spent a considerable amount of time in bed during his first week and playing cards with his buddies at other times. Joe was more industrious. He signed executive orders, more than any president in recent years, though he also spent a lot of time in bed. You know, a guy gets fatigued.

Pore over the newspapers. Sit down before the evening news on television. You will find very little reason to take issue with the fabulists. Joe's first week was so flawless that he was almost boring. I think the columnist Ruth Marcus captured the flawlessness of it all best.

She wrote in The Washington Post Sunday: "As I write, he's been in office for all of nine days. In that time, as I've said, he's confronted more varied crises than any president; he's moved to undo some of Trump's worst policies (tax cuts! deregulation! court nominations! -- emphasis mine) and he's begun the hard slog of fixing the pandemic disaster that Trump left behind (warp speed! -- italics mine once again). The execution has been solid. There's been no distracting personnel foul-up." Bravo, Ms. Marcus!

As Marcus writes, Joe's execution has been "solid." There has been "no distracting personnel foul-up." I guess that means no sightings of Hunter. No one in the mainstream media would disagree. I think it is only a matter of time before the citizenry of San Francisco settles on the name to place on public buildings that they have recently denuded. In the place of Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington, they will raise the name of Joe Biden. Soon, the mania will spread to other cities. How about the Biden Memorial, the Biden Monument, the Statue of Biden?

Yet some of us living outside the bubble that Marcus and the mainstream media inhabit might disagree with the gravamen of her column. There was at least one episode last week that was not flawless. It was caught on tape and presented on YouTube. Joe was speaking from the White House. His eyes were a bit glassy. His speech was not quite right. He was talking about how he was going to distribute the vaccine, and I, for one, was not impressed. I transcribed him as best I could, but there are frequent ellipses because, well, Joe often descends into bibble-babble. Often it is difficult to retrieve a complete sentence from the mush. See if you can make any sense of it.

It goes like this: "We expect these additional 200 million doses to be delivered this summer ... by the midsummer that this vaccine will be there. That increases the total vaccine order in the United States by 50% from 400 million ordered to 600 million. This enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 300 Americans by end of the summer, the beginning of the fall. I want to repeat, it will be enough to fully vaccinate 300 Americans."

Now I want to make clear that I do not think that Joe meant to say 400 million doses of the vaccine, or even 600 million doses of the vaccine, will be given to a lucky 300 Americans. But how many Americans will be receiving the vaccine this summer? What is more, what is one to make of these massive misstatements?

Let us face the facts. The mainstream media has done a thorough job covering for Joe and turning former President Donald Trump into an ongoing scandal. This started with Trump in 2015. With Joe, it might have been going on for decades. But things are not going to get any easier for Joe in the years ahead. What is he going to sound like when the Chinese deliver their first challenge? What will he say when Vladimir Putin steps forward? Those are just two of America's many hostile rivals. What comes next? When the media was not reporting the news but reconfiguring the news, did the Ruth Marcuses of the world ever think that the American electorate deserved an accurate sense of who was running for office year after year? Americans are going to get an accurate view of the quality of mind that they recently elected in the coming year.

What comes next? When the media was not reporting the news but reconfiguring the news, did the Ruth Marcuses of the world ever think that the American electorate deserved an accurate sense of who was running for office year after year?

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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