When a politician says that "something isn't about something," you can be sure that it is precisely about that thing. When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker says that his budget repair bill (which strips public sector unions of collective bargaining rights) is not about collective bargaining rights, he means that it is precisely about ending collective bargaining rights (you can read more here and here) .
Governor Walker is a master of Orwellian Doublethink and has used it effectively even to reprogram union members who supported him in the last election. One sympathizes with members of the Tea Party Movement who feel that they cannot trust politicians to tell the truth. But they also have been reprogrammed into accepting contradictory ideas such as "respecting public sector workers" involves taking away their collective bargaining rights .
It's interesting that almost 100 years after Eric Blair (George Orwell) wrote his satirical novels about totalitarianism, the right wing of the Republican party has aligned itself with business interests, mastered Orwell's writings and effectively risen to power--all this after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
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