Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

I hope Craig Crawford is writing tongue in cheek, or at least with a feeling of obligation to be politically neutral, in his review of The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina by Frank Rich. The expected response to Rich’s book detailing the misinformation campaigns of the Bush Administration would be outrage. Instead Crawford almost commends Bush for his successful use of such strategies.

But while President Bush’s political gurus will likely quibble with certain items in Mr. Rich’s bill of particulars. . .they have every reason to gloat in response to this recitation of their tactical maneuvers. After all, so much of what Mr. Rich details –and deplores –worked well for the Bush White House, at least in winning the short-term gains they were seeking in each of the episodes presented.

This is like reading Orwell’s 1984 as a “how to” manual for would-be authoritarians. Come to think of it, considering the manner in which they use propaganda, perhaps they did. There are many examples of Orwellian propaganda which came from the Bush Administration reviewed in Rich’s book. Crawford pays particular attention to the Swift Boat Liars:

The truly cynical political operator, whether Republican or Democrat, could read this book as a manual for how to use deception, misinformation and propaganda to emasculate your enemies, subdue the news media and befuddle the public, and not as the call to arms for truth that Mr. Rich seeks to provide.

When he sets his jeweler’s eye upon the so-called Swift-boating of the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, for instance, future candidates for office get point-by-point instruction on how to turn a campaign liability into an asset: in this case how someone with no combat experience can successfully run on national security issues against someone who was actually shot on the battlefield.

Mr. Rich asserts that the Bush camp, “so brilliant at creating fictional stories for their own man,” managed to “create a fictional biography for Kerry” that offset the stories of his heroism as captain of a Swift boat in Vietnam, leaving the war hero “stripped of his medals–so that he would be on the same footing as a president whose Vietnam service consisted of sporadic participation in the Texas ‘Champagne unit’ stateside.”

The gambit of course worked. The president won re-election in 2004, thanks in no small measure to the seeding of doubts about one of Mr. Kerry’s major assets in that wartime campaign: his own combat record.

The claims of the Swift Boat Liars so clearly differed from all documented evidence, and were so thoroughly refuted, that only those blinded by extreme partisanship could not recognize these as outright lies. The Bush Administration knew that the Bush-worshippers in the blogosphere and right wing media would parrot their lies, on this and every other matter, regardless of the evidence. Too many people in the general public, bombarded by an endless stream of misinformation, are just too overwhelmed to check all the facts. Modern technology allows for many ways to both disperse both information and propaganda. Hopefully the information provided by people like Frank Rich will allow more to see through the propaganda, as opposed to being used as a source for ideas by future Administrations which desire to deceive the public.