It has been written many times that Britain and the U.S. are separated by a common language. I think the same thing can be said of Washington, D.C. and the rest of the United States.
- National guard troops are to be deployed August 1 to help guard the U.S.-Mexico border. No troops show up. Washington interprets deployment as getting ready to send troops and guarding as watching what happens, but taking no action.
- President Obama promises no new taxes. The Bush tax cuts are set to expire January 1. Washington interprets tax cut expiration as going back to normal, not increasing taxes.
- President Obama tell U.S. senior citizens that they will benefit from the new health care plan. Washington interprets that as a signal to take $500 billion out of Medicare funds for general health care.
- The jobless rate continues to stay above 9% nationally and just increased. Washington tells us that it has saved or created almost 3 million jobs.
I can only surmise that Washington, D.C. has been the hub of an evolutionary event in the English language.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. - George Orwell; 1984.