The White House, we learned this week, has taken to sanitizing President Bush. That is, the president’s occasional – OK, “occasional” – bloopers, flubs and slips of the lip are corrected in the official administration transcripts of his speeches.

Instances cited in the story on this practice include his telling a crowd in Connecticut he wants all Americans to volunteer for “4,000 years” and introducing that state’s lieutenant governor, Jodi Rell, as Judi Kell. The day before, in Tennessee, the president was interrupted repeatedly by hecklers, resulting in several false from the dais.

The official White House transcripts, however, make no mention of these presidential goofs or of the audiential snickering that followed. The expected level of volunteerism is reduced to a more doable 4,000 hours, Ms. Rell is restored to her true identity, the heckling and stumbling never happened.

This scrubbing clean has caused much criticism and fretting. It’s been called Orwellian, something that smacks of “1984.” No less an expert in disinfecting the White House as Bill Clinton’s press secretary, Joe Lockhart, is troubled by the rewriting of history, asserting that back in his day the White House never went any further than covering up that president’s tendency to drop his “g’s.”

Unless “g’s” is a Clintonian euphemism for “trousers,” I assume Mr. Lockhart means that his boss’ lapses into Arkansian folksiness when speaking were corrected for the written record. For example, the statement, “Ah’m feelin’ as randy as a rooster in June,” would be tidied up to read, “No child should go to bed hungry.”

Just a little tweaking.

When it comes to the question of political speech and the use and misuse of words, references to George Orwell are always apt. The relevant work is not, however, “1984,” but a wonderful essay the great man wrote in 1946 called “Politics and the English language.”

Mr. Orwell begins by observing that, even back at a time when the words of Roosevelt and Churchill still rang through the air, political speech, the public statements of those in charge of society were fast becoming little more than ugly globs of empty phrases, tired metaphors and meaningless platitudes. He did not accept the notion that, since civilization is decadent, language must “share in the inevitable collapse.”

But he does not stop with mere grousing about boring speeches made up of cliches cobbled together “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The real problem is not that thought is expressed in hackneyed buzzwords, but that hackneyed buzzwords can be the basis for thought. The effect becomes the cause, “reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely … prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.”

Mr. Orwell then cites several examples in which slovenly language is the chicken and foolish thought is the egg, excerpts from essays and speeches covering issues relevant in post-World War II Britain. He says they are not the worst examples he could have used; they are representative of current political expression and illustrate the vicious cycle of empty words and bad ideas.

I’ll cite a couple of present-day examples. They are not the worst; they are representative. They are from the veto messages Gov. King issued this week to explain his rejections of two bills passed by the Legislature.

One bill would make part-time and seasonal workers eligible for unemployment benefits and would prevent disqualification of a person who loses a job because of unsolvable child care or transportation-related problems. The other would expanded health plan benefits for preventative treatment of mental illness and substance abuse. In both cases, the governor’s reason for veto was the impact the legislation would have upon Maine’s business climate.

There can be no emptier phrase at work in this state today than “business climate.” Nor can there be one more damaging. Despite its utter meaninglessness, it is used to defend economic-development programs that clearly do not work. It is used to prevent desperately needed reform of Maine’s tax structure. It is the flag under which bad ideas rally.

The question here is whether the governor is wrapping his bad ideas to veto these important bills in this flag or whether the bad ideas are the result of a thought process guided by such an empty phrase.

He describes the unemployment bill only as applying to those who “restrict their work search to less than full-time employment,” as if working part-time is some sort of indulgence. No mention of covering seasonal workers in a state that relentlessly promotes a seasonal tourism industry, or of the severe child-care shortages that go unaddressed or of the real transportation problems that remain despite all the state investments in tourist excursion trains and hike and bike trails. He cites the recent return to solvency of the state’s unemployment fund but does not mention that employers of part-time workers pay unemployment tax or that in the Maine economy he helped build some 100,000 Maine people work part time, or that 70 percent are low-income women often forced into welfare – more costly to taxpayers – if they lose their jobs. The expanded federal funds that would cover the increased annual cost, estimated at $3.6 million, for several years?

After that, the minimal demand this expansion would put upon the $400 million fund? The antiquated nature of a policy in place since 1939? No mention. Once “business climate” clogs the thought process, no thoughtfulness is required.

The mental-health parity veto is even worse. The increase in premiums would be in the 1 percent range. The savings from dealing with mental health issues and substance abuse problems in preventative ways, as the experience in other states and businesses proves, are enormous – fewer people in jail, higher productivity on the job, fewer sick days (the National Institutes of Health found that 61 percent of work absences are due to psychological problems), less domestic violence and child abuse. A very small increase in insurance premiums could buy a healthier, safer society and save taxpayers (including business owners) a bundle.

Again, an informed decision is made impossible by that thought-clogging “business climate.” Strangely, a bromide that can block logical thinking allows such pointless observations as “When you are in a hole, the first rule is not to dig any deeper,” and, “we cannot allow the best to become the enemy of the good,” to seep through.

After reading these two tortured veto messages by Gov. King, I’ll take President Bush’s 4,000 years of hard volunteer labor any day.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.