I gather that Winston Smith has joined the White House staff.

    Mr. Smith -- the protagonist of ``Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' a man we meet as the clocks are striking 13 -- works in Oceania for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents. In fact, he's a guy applying Wite-Out to history, obliterating the unpleasant, the unseemly, the inappropriate. So of course he's welcome in the Bush White House.

    I know he's working there because of what I read on the dailykos website: that the White House websites have been ''Wited out,'' scrubbed clean of some of Dick Cheney's more awkward remarks, like the one in March 2003, when he told ``Meet the Press'' that he believed that American troops in Iraq will be ``greeted as liberators.'' Ditto his May 2005 remarks to Larry King about those ''last throes ... of the insurgency.''

    I know this is upsetting, this blandly malevolent -- well, it can't be called rewriting history, can it? More like un-writing history. But I've given it some thought, and here's the bright side: if the vice president keeps on talking like a Lewis Carroll character, it's very possible that Winston Smith will one day be ordered just to obliterate Cheney altogether.