Sometimes I try to remind myself that President Bush isn’t as bad as I think he is and that, despite well-founded fears, he’s not really a fascist sociopath. That usually lasts for a few days until I come across something like this, a passage one would reasonably expect to find in something written by George Orwell:

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

That’s not Orwell. That’s Bush, in a speech at a school in New York about his plan to “overhaul” (read: incapacitate) Social Security. The transcript indicates that the line was followed by applause, something I find equally disturbing. Bush’s comment was in reference to the fact that he had said for the third time “if you’ve retired, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I’ll probably say it three more times,” he quipped.

Funny, in an Orwellian sense, perhaps, but also a sobering reminder of the fascism lingering just behind the curtain of the neo-conservative agenda.