I planned to wash my car today, but I think I'll wait till General Patreous comes out with his September Report.

Michael to LameMan:

Are you going to be posting this same comment over and over until September? Perhaps you are one of the reasons Mr. Allen "is so interested and enthusiastic about the communication strategy of the administration."

-- Michael Harold

You probably won't see LameMan admit to this, Michael, but he is making dry humor. You should have read William T's Post a few back about humor.

My memory was wrong on this one. Having forgotten that Google is Magic, I found the original quote, and it wasn't really Noam -- it was the declaration of a U.S. corporate PR chief expressing astonishment at how compliant the 'watchdog' press was to their corporate PR.

As the U.S. government prepared to murder Guatemalan independence and set them straight on course for generations of tyranny and Reaganite genocide, the government demanded and received complete obedience from the U.S. media.

Keep this set of quotes in mind all ye who want to believe that the supplication of U.S. news producers in the face of hawkish policies is some recent development.

...in internal government discussions on the eve of the overthrow of the government of Guatemala in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles "expressed very great concern about the Communist line being followed by Sydney Gruson in his dispatches to the New York Times," which President Eisenhower then described as "the most untrustworthy newspaper in the United States."

CIA director Allen Dulles "pointed out some very disturbing features of Sidney Gruson's career to date" and the assembled dignitaries decided "to talk informally to the management of the New York Times" -- successfully, it appears; Gruson was sent to Mexico after Allen Dulles communicated to the top Times management suspicions that Gruson and his wife, Times columnist Flora Lewis, were Communist agents or sympathizers, asking the Times to remove him from Central America during the coup.

This was during a period when the Times and other media were being spoon-fed appropriate material by the public relations specialists of the United Fruit Company, though, as its PR director Thomas McCann later wrote: "It is difficult to make a convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims proved so eager for the experience."

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c10-s22.html

But aren't there actually guidlines in place designed to prevent the Army from engaging in Psy-Ops against the American people? Because the last time I checked there was a word for waging war against the American people though its not commonly used when describing the activities of the Military. (Certain hatemongers of course throw the word around like penny candy when desribing their fellow countrymen who happen to dislike violence.)

I speak of course of Treason.

Mike Allen: I think different presidents have different needs at different times, and I think that Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan did a great job at the time that they were there.

Ari?!?!? Scotty?!?!? The very best that Ari could do is lie, dissemble, and stonewall with a straight face. Which ranks him up there with talents like "Baghdad Bob". Scotty started to squirm too much, and it was painful to watch....

Cheers,

Just as we are seeing a disturbing wave of private mercenaries like Blackwater receive huge contracts for security-work from Iraq to post-Katrina New Orleans, what kinds of mercenary work is taking place in the military PR area, and in the press proper. The significance of outsourcing of this kind is that the 'mercenaries' escape much of the oversight and legal containment that US forces and government employees would. So a PR consulting firm working for the Army, for example, might have all kinds of latitude that the Army itself doesn't have.

Outsourcing propaganda to the press. What a strange, chilling, incredible concept. I have to sit for a minute and figure out exactly what kind of weird echo chamber that creates. Kind of like the Congress outsourcing the writing of laws to the Administration. Or the White House press corps outsourcing reporting to Tony Snow. The last one has a recursive loop to it, as did the O'Hanlon -- Cheney loop a couple of days ago. The Cheney -- Safire loop on Mohammed Atta's non-meeting in Prague. Or the Real Estate pages in the paper analyzing the market and written by realtors. Or offshoring our foreign policy. Or maybe offshoring our domestic energy policy.

Wow! You could cause a financial bubble with this stuff! Or start a war.

... trying to ridicule the MSM/maladministration. Take sound bite. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Granted, even watching classic old SNL for the 37th time, it does lose its cachet, but for the time being, I think that "Lame Man"'s exhortations do focus the mind and provide a little grin as well.

Cheers,

Thanks, Kitt. I actually do appreciate LameMan's humor, intentional or not. He gave enough of a hint the first time he (or she) wrote it, "Lather, rinse, repeat," to give him (or her) the benefit of the doubt.

It is a little Strangelovian, (which is a compliment, I think).

Somewhat akin to:

Well, I've been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones. You sure you got today's codes?

and this one:

God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural... fluids. God bless you all.

As things get worse, the propaganda has to get stronger, e.g., "shoe production exceeds targets by 500%!" and less people believe because it becomes ridiculous. Note: I am discussing the 75% reachable Americans, not the Fox 25%. I sometimes wonder if the Fox viewers remember to go to the bathroom.

[Insert Vitter joke here]

The other problem occurs when propagandists or their enablers start to brag about the propaganda openly. This tends to blunt the effectiveness a bit (Again, excluding Fox viewers).

The O'Hanlon-Pollack Bamboozle-palooza may be the tipping point since we are seeing both fierce, immediate push-back, and those two toads bragging about it. Credibility tends to enter a death spiral after that. See Gonzales, Alberto.