Thursday, January 13, 2005

The Thin Edge of the Wedge

I mentioned the other day how alarmed I was at the "covert propaganda" by the Bush administration, uncovered by the US govt itself and being found to violate federal law. The story was never big, and it's fast been buried. A bigger ripple has been made by the news that the "journalist" Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to shill for the inane & unworkable educational policies put forth by the Bushies. It's a bigger story, but it still isn't causing the sort of resonance and alarm it deserves. Anyone who has studied the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s knows how important Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda machine was in creating a mythos of Hitler as a leader without parallel, ready to lead the thronging masses that didn't really know his agenda but adored him anyway and followed him blindly into wars of aggression conducted on the shaky groundwork of a network of lies. (Does any of this sound in the least familiar?) The same thing is happening now -- people who voted for Bush still believe that Saddam & Osama are in the same bowling league and that dirty bombs are hidden all over Iraq & sooner or later, darn it, we'll find the confounded things.

Can no one think ahead to see where all this is heading?

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