Sunday, January 09, 2005

Propaganda alert

There is an article at the New York Times web site about how the Bush administration broke the law by producing "news segments" about drugs which constitute "covert propaganda."

This is just a small blip on the radar, given what the Bush administration is capable of, but I think it's important nonetheless for several reasons:
  • the allegation comes from within the government itself, via the Government Accountability Office
  • taxpayer funds were used to generate propaganda, which is prohibited by law
  • and there is a telling quote from the office that created the propaganda, saying that the GAO was creating "a mountain out of a molehill" and that they had not, in fact, broken any laws at all
In the Bushtopian Mind-Bending Alternate Reality, breaking the law is not, really, breaking the law at all, as long as they're the ones not breaking it.

Do you follow that?

So much of what the Bush adminstration says is so much propaganda that it's easy to evoke scary parallels to Joseph Goebbels, another government official of old with an eye for news "packaging" (& similar disdain for the truth) and who would be right at home these days in the White House. He & Karl Rove would have lots to talk about ...

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