Over and Over and Over...

The spirit of Goebbels is alive and well. The Bush White House is employing an effective program called Friends & Allies. The way it works is the White House and RNC staff regularly prepare a list of talking points ("D.C. Talkers") and e-mail the list to pundits and journalists to get them out in print and over the airwaves. The idea is that if you provide the material to those who are friendly to your cause, they will air your message and help to define the terms of the issue. That is why you will find a lot of talking heads on television and radio spouting the same lines and ideas, propagating a very disciplined message. Not surprisingly, that message is often false or misleading. For example, just recently you had Rev. Joe Watkins, Bill O'Reilly and Dick Morris all making similarly misleading claims about poverty trends in the Bush and Clinton administrations. It's almost impossible to imagine that both O'Reilly and Morris could come up on their own with the asinine argument that the poverty rate at the midway point of a presidency is some sort of meaningful indicator. (Although with O'Reilly, anything is possible.)

This is just one more method of propaganda delivery from the administration that brought you pundit payola (Armstrong Williams et al.) and fake news releases.

Bush once said, "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." Recall that this comes from a president who has introduced programs that accomplish just the opposite of their names. (See No Child Left Behind, Clear Skies Initiative.) In fact, it is the propaganda that is catapulting the truth. And I haven't even brought up the subject of Iraq.