Double Speak

I found this post at The Corner, by Ramesh Ponnuru, to be jaw-dropping.

I've read Brooke Allen's fiction reviews in The New Criterion and the New York Times for years. I've never had any idea what her politics were. Her recent essay in The Nation gives us a hint. Here's how it starts: "It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles."

If the "lie" that America was founded on Christian principles is a "favorite" of an administration that believes in repeating its lies often, then the president and his principal subordinates must make that claim all the time. I can't remember a single occasion when they have made the claim. For Allen to accuse the administration of being prone to lying and utter an untruth of her own in the same breath is not an auspicious beginning to her essay.

How do people like Allen get jobs as journalists. It boggles the mind.