Steve, at a blog called “Rabid Sanity“, has discovered that politicians often try to disguise private and nefarious agendas in simple-minded catch phrases.

He has submitted a paper to the American Psychological Society. Surely there is more to follow. This is a stunning breakthrough.

Adolf Godwin Hitler, in his book, Mein Kampf, defined the “big lie” as one so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. It’s a propaganda technique, not terribly effective but often used. Sometimes one can spot a “big” lie by an overly specific account of something. For example, Karl Rove says that George W. Bush read 95 books in 2006, 51 in 2007, and 40 in 2008 (his total has declined – I can only assume he will slip in another 20 or so today).

It seems appropriate that it is Rove spinning this fanciful tale, as he is often referred to as “Bush’s Goebbels”. Rove is a professional liar and not a man to be trusted about anything, even the color of his eyes. He’s endured, for eight years now, the uppity criticism of Bush from the nation’s effete snobs – Bush is maligned as the C-student who is sheltered from bad news. He’s being replaced now by an intellectual, a man who thinks, writes, and above all, reads. Rove is a little testy.

There’s a reason – the critics, effete though they may be, are right. And eight years of the Bush Administration have yielded a major terrorist attack on the country, two unwinnable wars, unimaginable deficits, decrepit federal agencies unable to respond to disaster, and financial collapse. That’s only a partial list of major failures. Add an attack on the Constitution.

That’s the price of not reading.

I know Rove is lying – heck, most of us figured that out right away. But I’ll put up a little evidence. One, many have opined and offered anecdotal evidence that Bush is dyslexic. That doesn’t mean that he is not smart – only that reading is troublesome to him, so that he has to rely on other traits (such as an uncanny ability to read people, if not books) to gather data from around him and process it. Bush relies on staff to verbally summarize reports – due to trust issues, he only likes to hear one side. Hence, disaster.

Winston Churchill was dyslexic. It’s not necessarily debilitating. What undid Bush was not dyslexia, but rather isolation from competing viewpoints. But one thing it certainly means is that Bush did not read books.

Secondly, Bush has himself admitted that he does not read newspapers. As he told Brit Hume in 2003, he started his day by asking Andrew Card “what’s in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what’s moving. I rarely read the stories.”

A man who can’t bring himself to read a full newspaper account is unlikely to dive into the tomes that Rove credits him with reading – “David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Hugh Thomas’s “Spanish Civil War,” Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg” and David King’s “Vienna 1814.” … U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs”; Jon Meacham’s “American Lion”; James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”

I challenge anyone reading this to cite an instance in any of Bush’s extemporaneous, unscripted comments, in which he made a historical reference. Any.

Bush might have been an adequate president if he had actually read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”, as Rove claims he did.” He might not have surrounded himself with yes-persons. His administration is legend for being wrong with extreme clarity of vision, of the tunnel variety. Indeed, if George W. Bush could read a book, he could have spared us all a load of grief.

P.S. New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Bush Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read — the only title he could find was “The Fart Book.”

P.P.S. From one of Bush’s Yale classmates: it’s not the substance abuse in Bush’s past that’s disturbing, it’s the lack of substance … Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn’t interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn’t travel; he didn’t read the newspapers; he didn’t watch the news; he didn’t even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me.

It should not pass without notice that Barack Obama has been named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year for 2008, beating out Apple and Nike. His was a dynamic campaign which promoted mass participation (many small donations) even as it was mostly funded by fat cats — over $34 million from from the finance sector alone. His twin logos, “Hope” and “Change” were blank slates on which devoted followers could write their own script. And they we did.

Clever. Very clever.

In the meantime, Obama has embarked on a course traveled by Clinton in the 1990’s – heavy dominance by financial insiders and war hawks. No change, little hope.

The primary task of advertising is to bamboozle consumers, overwhelming their senses with useless and often prurient information, luring them into making irrational choices. Advertising stands capitalism on its head, negating the notion of informed choice. Obama’s choice by Ad Age is more than informative. It’s illustrative of business dominance of society. The heavy-handed thuggery of the Bush Administration had driven 75% of the population to cry out for change. Democratic leadership noted this public sentiment, and gave them what business wanted them to have – an advertising icon.

But no change. That is not allowed.

Here’s what I gather from the following statement by Craig Sprout:

Oh, and a note for the president of the Craig Sprout Fan Club (really, this man crush you have on me is kind of embarrassing), if there were only some way to respond to a post, other than in the comments, that would show up underneath the main post, then people could see that link and click on it and read a response at another site. Maybe someone should get to work on that, huh? They could call it . . . trackback . . . or maybe pingback . . . yeah, that’s the ticket. Someone should do that.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to run a blog, which is nothing more than a letter to the editor without the pesky editor lording over us. I have linked to Craig in a snarky kind of way, having a small joke over his decision to ban comments from his site. But what he did is an interesting phenomenon, likely tied in on an eerie psychological level to right wing talk radio. In that forum conservatives get together all day long and talk about liberals and progressives without any interference from … liberals and progressives. They get to frame the debate by defining the issue and demonizing the opposition all at once. Since the medium itself is at least as important as the content broadcast over that medium, it’s important to understand what is being practiced: propaganda.

I use the word carefully. I know what it is, I know how it works. It’s a means of persuasion using psychological tools, drowning out opposition being just one of many. It’s a vehicle that can carry any philosophy from fascist to communist. It’s been used over the years in just about every country with mass media – some (like the U.S.) very skilled, some (like the U.S.S.R.) very clumsy.

Craig is just a little guy, like me, about as noticeable as a fart in a slaughterhouse. But his technique is worthy of comment. He has adopted the methods of talk radio, perhaps unknowingly. He’s now part of the right wing noise machine – he allows no dissent and insists that his message be the only one on display. The psychology is fascinating.

Developments [in the modern world] are not merely beyond man’s intellectual scope; they are also beyond him in volume and intensity; he simply cannot grasp the world’s economic and political problems. Faced with such matters, he feels his weakness, his inconsistency, his lack of effectiveness. He realizes he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair. Man cannot stay in this situation too long. He needs an ideological veil to cover harsh reality, some consolation, a raison d’être, a sense of values. And only propaganda offers him a remedy for a basically intolerable situation. Jacques Ellul, “Propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”

I feel this weakness every time I open a book or newspaper and read about current events. We are all essentially playing a game where we take the otherwise undecipherable events of a world that is complex beyond our ability to grasp and reduce them to manageable thoughts and concepts. Some of us who read a lot get very good at spraying words about, and can even deal conceptually in these matters, but it is really pretense.

The above quote isn’t talking about Joe Schmeau, the guy who doesn’t know whether to vote for Obama or McCain. He’s fine. His vote will rectify his despair. It’s talking about us pompous fools who think we really have a larger grasp of things. We are educated beyond 12th grade, given to one political outlook or another (liberal, libertarian, etc.), and we seek out propaganda. We need our propaganda. Without it, we can’t carry on with our essential business, that of having an opinion on every damned thing on the face of the earth.

The purpose of this post is to put my feet on the ground and accept that this is a game we play to fight our despair over our inability to control events that deeply affect our lives. We are hopelessly dependent on decisions and events we cannot understand, much less control. Putting up a blog is the ultimate expression of hopelessness. It’s a flimsy cover.

But it’s fun.

“Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?”

“Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

This quote is evidence that President Bush knows a little something about how a different game is played in Washington: media management. Images are created and controlled, because images have power. The government is actively involved in controlling what we see, as they know it affects how we think about what they are doing.

Let’s backtrack. It is often said that the media played a role in the U.S. defeat in Vietnam by doing negative reporting. Indeed, there was a cadre of brave young reporters, like Neil Sheehan, who reported what they saw, often ugly. But most reporters were loyal, some slavishly so. What happened in Vietnam was probably inadvertent, caused by the inexperience of people in understanding the nature and power of their own medium, television. It was still young back then.

Television is comprised of two signals running side-by-side – audio and video. The audio is often filtered or ignored by the viewer, but the video leaves a lasting impression. Reporting in Vietnam often contained ghastly images of death and destruction, and though the words may have been in support of the government and the military, the images penetrated consciousness and made us aware of what was going on.

That’s not the whole story, of course. There was disagreement among elites about the cost of the war to us, leading to some negative reporting. Unlike Iraq, that war did not have uniform backing in power centers. And returning soldiers were telling horror stories, which made the rounds. But from a pure propaganda standpoint, the media blew it in Vietnam.

Post-Vietnam, the Pentagon has involved us in an ongoing experiment in media management. Perhaps the first try, a kind of dry run, was in 1983 in Grenada, an insignificant island that President Reagan invaded shortly after 241 U.S. military personnel were killed in Lebanon. The Pentagon was ham-handed about it, confining reporters to a military vessel and spoon feeding them. Reporters didn’t like it. It was a different era.

The 1989 attack on Panama was handled in much the same manner – this time the spoon feeding was done by none other than Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. As I watched him during that invasion, I remember getting cold chills. Pure evil. But in terms of media management, Panama was a success. To this day, we don’t know how many people the U.S. killed, and absent images, few have been curious.

The first Gulf War showed us a military well advanced in news and image management. That war was shown to us as a video arcade, sanitized and bloodless. As with other wars, we have no idea how many people we killed in the massive aerial bombardment. To this day people think of Gulf I as a clean war where they used precision bombing to pinpoint targets and spare civilians. But estimates of civilian casualties run as high as 158,000, including 32,000 children, but imagery of the grisly deaths never penetrated American consciousness. The media managers at the Pentagon had done their jobs.

Mostly. One slight problem cropped up during that war. George H.W. Bush was roundly criticized for playing golf at Kennebunkport in 1990 while deploying troops to the Middle East. It looked really bad, and showed his indifference to the problems of ordinary people. George W. Bush learned the lesson – casualties may mount, but images must be managed. No golf, dammit!

So we’ve come the full circle – the lessons of Vietnam have been absorbed, and modern warfare is carried on in a sanitized environment with managed images as part of the ongoing propaganda. In 2008 we’re not even allowed to see flag-draped coffins, so tight is the control.

The object is to keep the public actively behind the war. But in Iraq in 2008, as in Vietnam in 1968, reality interferes, just as it did with Bush’s golf game. Even without the grisly images, the public has soured on Iraq. Damned reality.

Craig at mtpolitics.net put up a post on Governor Schweitzer’s Climate Change Advisory Council. This was followed by Carol over at Missoulapolis, and then followed by GeeGuy at Electric City Weblog, and likely more to follow. It has the makings of a RWCJ (right wing circle jerk) – this is our own miniature version of what is known nationally as the Right Wing Noise Machine – that loud group of petulant, obsessive and overbearing jerks who all happen to have access to microphones.

The annoying thing about the whole process is that there’s no thoughtful criticism, no reasoned discussion, no nothing – when the right wing wants to talk about something, as Marshall McLuhan so famously intoned, the medium is the message. It’s not content, it is the noise that matters.

This is probalby the future of the Montana right wing blogosphere – an attempt to recreate what is done nationally locally. Problem is – blogs are not noisy. And there is balance. Nationally right wingers dominate the media – yes, even the “liberal media” is right wing. With so much power at their disposal, they set the tone and content of most of what we discuss. Obama’s Pastor Wright was not a big deal, but was made one by the incessant noise – we had no choice but blather on about it because it was being replayed for us on every news outlet, every righty blabber-outlet, and of course, linked at every right wing blog.

That’s power. It’s not thoughtful. We never really discuss anything in a thoughtful manner. Obama tried in his reasoned repsonse to the right wing circus, but it didn’t fly as well as the manic frenzy surrounding the pastor’s remarks.

There’s a word for this. Propaganda. Incessant noise is part of the trade. Drowning out opposing viewpoints, dominating the stage, marginalizing reason – it’s how its done. It’s not accidental.

So I guess it comes as no surprise that the right wing Montana blogosphere is imitating the national right wing noise machine. They’re neophytes right now, but they are studying the subject, working at it, trying to figure out how to harness the energy of blogs as part of the machine. More to follow, I’m sure.

Anyway, concerning the Climate Change Advisory Council, Schweitzer did what politicians do – he bestowed some favors, gave the impression of positive activity towards a noble cause, and not much more. I don’t expect much from this group, and I must say, anticipating their first public pronouncement on proper save-the-planet behavior, than I am not impressed with the burnout rate of our fluorescent light bulbs. They are not, repeat, not lasting five years. And my lying eyes must be deceiving me, but our rooms are dimmer. Much dimmer.

Senator John McCain says about Iraq “We’re succeeding. I don’t care what anybody says. I’ve seen the facts on the ground.” It’s a good example of the art of framing, the things we are allowed to talk about, and the things that cannot be broached.

Succeeding? At what? That is the critical key – our invasion of Iraq was illegal, its consequences devastating to the population, and its ultimate goals unstated here in the land of the free, but easily understood elsewhere. We’ve sent over two million people packing, killed hundreds of thousands more, and malnutrition and disease are rampant. We’ve failed to rebuild infrastructure destroyed as long ago as 1991.

We’ve failed in many ways, but truthfully, we never really tried. As McCain understands, in the important areas – control of the resources, construction of permanent occupation bases that will house 100,000 troops, marginalization of the local population – in those areas, we’re succeeding. He means just what he says. He’s not stupid. We’re doing what we set out to do.

This is critical to understanding American involvement in this war. The mainstream media, the Republicans and the Democrats are all in agreement. We have a right to “succeed”. The only argument the Democrats are putting up is that the Republicans are incompetent. That’s why talk of withdrawing troops by both Democratic candidates is just campaign rhetoric. There might be a showboat debarking of a unit or two, but we are there for keeps.

Iraq is nothing new save its massive scale and that it was done openly – it was too big to keep secret. As much as we talk about it, it is still largely minimized by the media. (When was the last time a pundit or journalist mentioned our 180,000 mercenaries soldiers, or even gingerly touched on the civilian death toll?)

For so long as I have been alive (not that there is any connection), the U.S. has invaded other countries and stolen resources, placed puppets in power and rigged elections and murdered leaders. They’ve had success. But Iraq has been troublesome. The local population hasn’t buckled under (though, due to some serious bribery, there has been some acquiescence lately). There’s an active resistance, and the government we appointed has thus far failed us. They have refused to officially turn control of oil over to American companies. They have yet to control the indigenous resistance (which we label “Al Qaeda”). In short, they are threatening to be independent.

If it keeps up, we’ll have to install new puppets. It will be regime change, Act II. Cue the band.

Come November, with a new administration, perhaps we’ll have more success. In the meantime, we won’t talk about Iraq in any other framework than “success” or “failure”. It’s not allowed. Mainstream media knows this. (Glenn Greenwald ran a rather interesting piece on how true war critics are shut out of media conversations. See “The Ongoing Exclusion of War Opponents From the Iraq Debate”, currently featured at his web site.) True analysis of means, motives and methods is not allowed.

Most Americans get this. Some of us are just a bit slower.

The brouhaha over the speech by Barack Obama’s pastor is troublesome. We here in the United States don’t have double standards. We’re above that – our standards are triple, quadruple. Typical of any great power where citizens are deeply indoctrinated from birth, any sentiment expressed against our country and its activities are automatically held up for ridicule and condemnation. Those who hold themselves up for leadership have to profess deep and abiding love for the motherland, and commissars and brownshirts are on the lookout for transgressions. Even if the perceived sin is minor or disconnected from the candidate, he is held accountable.

So I note with interest that Barack Obama has been called to task for 1) not wearing a lapel pin showing the flag; 2) not holding his hand over his heart during the national anthem; 3) having a wife who implied that in times past she had not “really” been proud of her country; and 4) having a pastor who knows a little history and gave some emotional expression thereto.

Standards were no less severe in the old Soviet Union. Commissars were really proud all the time.

Thoughtful journalists are now analyzing the speech by The Reverend Jeremiah Wright for ideological purity. It’s not that the reverend is not allowed to express his thoughts freely. We pride ourselves in allowing free expression. But we do punish it severely. (We never allow thought criminals to appear on TV or be published in newspapers, except to be ridiculed.) The Reverend Wright obviously committed thought crime. The only question is, should Barack Obama be held accountable for the crime?

Most say yes – he is guilty by association. Some are withholding judgment – yes, there is some sort of crime here, but let’s withhold full imputation of guilt until the exact nature of the crime is detailed. Gotta hear the whole speech.

It’s not a matter of extremism. All manners of extremism are expressed daily in our land, though I must admit that when everyone is extreme, no one is extreme.

Take for example the beliefs of Pastor John Hagee, who has endorsed John McCain. Hagee’s views are probably not extreme here in the home of the brave, hence the free pass. But he has called the Catholic Church a “great whore”, a standard fundamentalist view, and believes that the Unites States should launch a first strike on the sovereign nation of Iran, thereby triggering Armageddon. Billions will die in that event, but fundamentalists, giving way to base sadism, rejoice in that.

John McCain says he is “very honored” by Hagee’s support, though it must be said that he is concerned about losing the Catholic vote. That’s rational.

I’m slow and thick, so bear with me: We only hold politicians accountable for thought crimes that involve criticism of the United States? The expression of hatred for the Catholic Church or a death wish for the mass of humanity is common, not extreme, and therefore not punishable?

I come in contact with this every day. Our atmosphere is oppressive, rigorous orthodoxy is vigorously enforced. But we also have a first amendment. We are different from the Soviets in that we don’t put people in jails or asylums for speaking out against the homeland. We’re more thoughtful than that. We merely marginalize these people and excoriate anyone even remotely associated with them.

You gotta have your mind right. And the lesson here is that if we associate with anyone who expresses thoughts that are not patriotic, there is accountability.

I got it now. Barack Obama, you are guilty of thought crime. Account for yourself.

Propaganda is easy to defeat. Sunlight is all it takes. Once a person is aware that something is propaganda, it loses its effectiveness. Therefore, much of the battle in American politics is about credibility – propaganda has to look like real news. Crude attacks and distortions have to have a credible basis.

Americans are swimming in propaganda, blissfully unaware. But that’s another story. It doesn’t do any good to talk about it, because Americans also think that we are sterile like an operating room, and that propaganda is done by evil people in other lands. So it’s interesting to watch the propagandists at work, plying thier trade. It’s amazing how good they are at it. It’s instructive and disheartening all at once.

Sidenote: It’s also interesting how the science of propaganda is not taught on any college campus. Insiders like Rove and Luntz did not study propaganda in college. They learned on the job. But it’s an organized body of knowledge that is passed on from one generation to the the next and improved upon. It originated under the Wilson Administration to build support for our involvement in World War I. Practitioners were themselves surprised at how effective it was – there were riots in American towns, Germans, like current Muslims, cowered in fear.

The latest gimmick in the arsenal of the propagandist is the viral video. It has advantages – like catching a cold, by the time the host is aware of it, the virus has already taken hold. They spring up out of nowhere. No one starts them, but every blog and bored emailer spreads them. They can be as ugly and evil as they please, as no one is accountable, especially not the people who spread them.

I’m referring, of course, to the current video making the rounds of Barack Obama’s pastor having a royal rant. It’s hurting him – hurting him badly. And he can’t do a damned thing about it.

I’d be very surprised if the video wasn’t put out from one of two sources: the Clinton campaign, or the Republican Party that prefers to run against Clinton over Obama. But that’s another advantage of the viral video – deniability. Neither group needs even remotely be associated with the attack.

That’s American politics. We’re not a thoughtful lot. Most of us, when we vote, haven’t anymore than a vague collections of impressions about the candidates we support. In 2004 most people voted for either Kerry or Bush thinking that they held positions completely opposite their actual stands. We are the Paris Hilton of democracy – we look good, but there’s no meaningful mental activity registering.

The art of politics is to make impressions. Fleeting impressions – people aren’t going to be swayed by logical analysis or principled stands. They won’t take the time. So it doesn’t do any good that Obama put up a thoughtful reply to the viral video. Few will read it.

Well, I’m here to do my part. Here’s some information being put out by Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain:

John McCain was a legacy – he didn’t earn his way in the military. It was handed him on a platter by his grandfather and father. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. He lost a total of five aircraft while piloting, three due to pilot error. He spent a total of 20 hours in combat in Vetnam, and for that was awarded a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit for Valor, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars, two Commendation medals plus two Purple Hearts and a dozen service medals. Most grunts passed through the military in far more danger, and got nothing in return save a dose of Agent Orange.

There are suspicions that McCain was given preferential treatment while in captivity in Vietnam due to his royal lineage (the Vietnamese thought they could use him as a bargaining chip), and that the Russians have evidence of this. Therefore, if elected president, Medvedev will have him over a barrel.

There. True, there’s no evidence beyond testimony of a shadowy group called Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain, not officially connected with any campaign. McCain might be able to put up information to counter everything above, but in so doing he calls attention to it and gives it credibilty. The only thing he can hope to do is ignore it and hope it has no effect.

Like Kerry did.