Compare.
All week long, President Bush traveled the country, cheerfully telling audiences that ”we’ve turned the corner” on the economy. But on Friday, in the face of the government’s paltry new numbers on job growth, the president’s new slogan suddenly sounded premature at best.
[…]
Rather than address his vulnerability head-on Friday, Mr. Bush delivered an upbeat assessment of the economy, saying it was getting stronger and lauding the American entrepreneurial spirit. “There’s more work to do to make this economy stronger,” he said at a rally at a farm in Stratham, N.H. “We’ve been through a recession, we’ve been through corporate scandals, we’ve been through a terrorist attack. But we’ve overcome these obstacles, because our workers are great, because our farmers are really good at what they do. We’ve overcome these obstacles because the entrepreneurial spirit is strong.”
This prompted cheers of “four more years.”
That’s from “Low Numbers, New Problems” in today’s New York Times. And now this:
Throughout the year the animals worked even harder than they had worked in the previous year To rebuild the windmill, with walls twice as thick as before, and to finish it by the appointed date, together with the regular work of the farm, was a tremendous labour. There were times when it seemed to the animals that they worked longer hours and fed no better than they had done in Jones’s day. On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. The animals saw no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food.
That, of course, is from Animal Farm. Chapter 8.