On spin

Sometimes I listen or watch or read the spin that politicians and government hacks lay out there, and I wonder: How stupid do they think we are?

But these are people who have been elected and/or placed in positions of trust, so I suspect they know there are quite a few actual or willfully very, very stupid people among us after all.

You read Nineteen Eighty-Four and conclude that no one could really get away with declaring, "War is Peace!" "Freedom is Slavery!" "Ignorance is Strength!"

And yet every day the ether is filled with those very words, or damn near close.

Reporters ask questions, pols respond, and the reporters dutifully journal what the pols said, without further question, even if the "answers" make no sense on their face, and call it journalism.

Surely, the observer says to himself, most people recognize that the reporters' questions were evaded, never truly answered.

Surely?