Received by e-mail from a colleague:

"When the White House published the text of and photos from Bush's speech announcing the supposed end of the Iraq attack, the headline read: "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." But on Tuesday, 19 Aug 2003, the Cursor website noticed that the headline had been changed to read: "President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." The word "major" had been added.

Apparently, with the quagmire resulting in at least one dead US soldier a day--not to mention even more injuries, dead Iraqis, and sabotage--that headline had proved incorrect. Therefore, straight out of 1984, the headline was stealthily altered to make it seem as if that's what it had always said.

We were able to recover numerous instances of the unaltered headline. At the top of the page is the original headline, as it has been preserved on the Website of Scott Long, who collects photos of politicians on aircraft carriers. Under that, you'll find the headline as it is now."

It occurred to me recently that we have napalm only it's not called napalm any more, and any day soon we'll have escalation only they won't call it escalation any more. That very evening I switched on CNN Europe (that's the real commie fellow-traveller version) and what was the headline? Escalation.

I hope that the rest of the world will tell the shrub to take a flying f*** at himself with his sudden conversion to internationalisation (i.e. keep on running the show, but get other nationalities to supply their troops as walking targets in place of more valuable Americans), but if I were an American of draft age or a parent of kids in that age group I'd be worried.