‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Four.’
‘And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?’
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Much has been said already about the “unforced error” at the Democratic National Convention yesterday when the delegates voted over to put “God” back into the platform and state that the party considers Jerusalem the capital of Israel. As Carolina Journal’s Jon Ham noted, “The amendment was proposed by Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland after the party had taken a beating for several days when it was reported, mainly by conservative media, that God and Jerusalem had been airbrushed from the platform.”
There is a decided air of the ridiculous about the vote. I see something else, too. Take a look at the video in the link above, especially at the concluding reaction.
Party rules require a two-thirds majority vote to pass an amendment. The best one could say for the voice vote (and they dared not take an actual tally) was that it was about 50-50. No objective listener could hear two-thirds in favor — objective being the operative term.
As I have frequently pointed out, the Left puts politics above everything, and that necessarily includes objective truth. The Left champions politically expedient “truth” over fixed truth, regardless of whether today’s “truth” is directly counter to yesterday’s (satirized in Nineteen Eighty-Four with “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia,” then “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia”).
In the voted yesterday, the objective, fixed truth was that two-thirds of the voters did not voice support of the amendment. Nevertheless, the politically expedient “truth” is that they did. If the Party says that one-half equals two-thirds, how many was it?
