The Bush Administration has the normally liberal mainstream news media cowed, afraid that if they ask tough questions about the war, they’ll be called unpatriotic. It’s called “spin” today, but it used to be called propaganda. Let me give you examples.
Saddam is either dead or escaped. But the administration needs a captured body for closure, so they’re capturing relatives, no matter how distant.
“Saddam’s Half Brother Captured,” the headlines read.
Tomorrow it will be, “Saddam’s Fifth Uncle Twice Removed Captured.”
This has the same spin value Caesar enjoyed parading the French barbarian Vercintorix in chains behind his chariot through the streets of Rome.
Here’s another spin. You know that young gal who was captured and wounded when her truck drove into enemy lines, and was then freed by American troops. The media is building her into a feminist Joan of Arc (I personally believe she should never have been allowed near the battlefield. A society that won’t protect its women and children is Godless). I have no complaint about her courage; it’s just that I don’t like the media using her as a pawn.
Wars need heroes.
This also includes demonization of the enemy. There’s an Iraqi lady nicknamed “Dr. Germ,” involved with biological weapons. If we call her by her real name, something like, Irene Mohammed Esterhazy, she seems more human, maybe not as bad. Nicknames have long been employed as a technique to make the bad guys seem real bad, Tokyo Rose for one. The feds seized Dr. Germ’s house, but no germs were found.
We have a colonel named Dave who heads a germ warfare department at Fort Polk in Louisiana, but nobody calls him Dr. Maniac of Mustard (gas). They just call him Dave.
Bad guys need bad names.
Which begs the question. Where are all those chemical and biological weapons? I have no doubt a warehouse with jars of the stuff will be found, but whether that constituted a threat to the world as the Bush Administration claimed is open to debate. One thing’s for certain, Bush better find something.
All you poor countries out there. You know Dick Cheney, the vice president who hasn’t been seen publicly in months, who hides in a bunker. Want one of his companies to rebuild your poor country? Just get in a war with the US----and lose. It’s a sure thing. In the 1950s, there was an obscure movie called The Mouse That Roared starring Peter Sellers, about an impoverished country that got in a war with the US so it could get American aid. How prophetic.
The extreme right wing used to have a saying during Vietnam they loved, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” That’s been abandoned by zealots whose learning is confined to watching TV, who aren’t up to the challenge of different ideas in a republican form of democracy.
The guys with flags flying from their pickup trucks (many of whom have never served their country a day) who call me a traitor because I exercise my right in a free country to disagree, they’ll tell you they don’t care how much the war costs, believing as they do that it won’t impact their lifestyle.
“I don’t care. Screw it!”
That’s its own form of treachery.
An afterthought. Television executives are yellow. In commercials, they won’t portray a black man in prison or committing a crime because they’re afraid to. It’s not politically correct. Examples. In an insurance commercial, a white convict is told by his lawyer (humorously) that his (lawyer’s) insurance has been approved. The prison guard is black. In another commercial for security systems, a white man attempts a break-in of a house. The guy monitoring the security system, representing law and order, is black.
Since blacks are so well represented in the prison population, you think this is fair?
