Could George Orwell have imagined what's going on today?

Saturday marks the 64th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's book 1984:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes. Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party who works for the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism. His job is to re-write past newspaper articles so that the historical record always supports the current party line. Smith is a diligent and skillful worker, but he secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother.

With what's been going on lately, I can't help but wonder if we're there yet.

We have a media that is more interested in protecting their favored politician than in actually reporting the truth, often ignoring what should be major stories because they reflect negatively on their object of affection.

We have people calling for greater gun control as a means of preventing gun violence, yet Chicago - a city with gun-control laws these individuals would love to impose upon the rest of the nation - has one of the highest gun violence records in the country. How do these people not see the correlation?

We have children being expelled from school and even arrested because they have a toy gun or just drew a picture of one!

We have a monstrous government so completely out of control that the even President Barack Obama's former senior adviser David Axelrod says it's too big:

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” he explained.

The IRS targeted tea party and patriot groups. The Department of Justice bugged the phones of the press.

Now comes this from the Washington Free Beacon:

Contracted employees at an Environmental Protection Agency warehouse in Landover, Md., used surplus equipment to set up a gym and personal television spaces, a report by the agency inspector general released Monday said.
...
“The warehouse contained surplus gym equipment arranged to create exercise space for warehouse employees,” the report states. “The weights, machines, exercise equipment, and overall exercise area appeared to be well maintained. The exercise space was in excess of 30 by 45 feet. Carpet tiles from EPA inventory were placed on the floor in the gym area. This area has electrical power through an EPA power strip and provides music through other agency inventory items. Agency steno pads were used for recording workouts.”

That wasn't the only EPA story to make the news. How gargantuan does an agency have to be to give a fake employee numerous certificates of award?

“Richard Windsor” may have only been an alias for former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, but that didn’t stop him from being awarded numerous certificates for ethics and records management.

The EPA awarded certificates naming Jackson/Windsor a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Jackson, under her secret alias, was also awarded certificates for completing training modules on email records management.

Jackson set up a secret email address under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner first discovered it in November.

Thank goodness for non-traditional media so we can know about these things, because we aren't going to get it from what passes for today's press corps - especially when you consider the latest from Erick Erickson.

The Democratic National Committee issued a memo saying Republicans were 'overreaching' when it comes to the IRS and other scandals. That was Friday - and by Monday that was the term being used by the press and others defending Pres. Obama and his administration.

We know the majority of the main stream media parrot whatever the Democrats want repeated, but apparently they're oblivious to how transparent they've become.

Add to this the recent court ruling that police can take a DNA swab of arrestees because it's just like taking fingerprints. And another court ruled that Google must turn over customer records to the FBI upon demand and without a warrant:

A federal judge has ruled that Google Inc. must comply with the FBI's warrantless demands for customer data, rejecting the company's argument that the government's practice of issuing so-called national security letters to telecommunication companies, Internet service providers, banks and others was unconstitutional and unnecessary.

Maybe it's not 1984 at all. I'm not sure that even Orwell could have imagined all this would become the norm.