I have absolutely no idea whether or not Americans actually feel that Hilary Clinton is a Big Brother style control freak with a desire to enforce some kind of conformity or not. And in a way that’s not the point of the video detournment below. What I find absolutely gripping is that it’s an active demonstration about how easy it is to take the empty language of contemporary politics—language that is so circumspect about what it asserts as to be fundamentally meaningless—and make it seem to mean pretty much anything.
Contemporary satirists have known for a while that it’s really quite easy to take the vacuity of these soundbites and put them under a harsh spotlight that makes them shrivel and die. What’s new is the ease with which they can be made to appear not to be depressing or hypocritical but genuinely creepy and evil.
In this the 1984 associations seem genuinely apropos—this is language deformed and broken, language as a fog of reassuring noise where the words no longer have even the slightest hypothesised reference to the real world. I have, of course, no evidence that Barack Obama is any better.