alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

August 1, 2007

The Republican Surge Machine

by AltHippo @ 11:55 am. Filed under propaganda

One of the reasons for starting this blog (or really a predecessor blog) was the level of propaganda and disinformation during the build up to the Iraq invasion. I genuinely felt like I was living inside of George Orwell’s brain, and he was writing the episode of September 2002 to March 2003 as a lesson to never let something like this happen.

I was living in Cambridge at the time, and tended to hang out with mostly full-throated lefty types. Not all, I had one friend who was a staunch Republican. Virtually everyone I knew believed that the war with Iraq was justified, either because of a potentially nuclear-armed Hussein or as a way of punishing the evil-doers responsible for 9.11. This is a lizard brain. This is a lizard brain post-9.11.

There’s an illusion created by PR (which I’ll use as a nicer way of saying disinformation and propaganda) campaign that a bunch of people saying the same thing at the same means that many people think the same thing, and you should, too. It’s a bandwagon, jump on it. A PR campaign is similar to a military campaign. These things are planned out, battle lines are drawn, timing is decided on, the movement of troupes is detailed.

In this case the purpose of the PR campaign is to convince Joe and Jill Sixpack that the surge is working, stay the course, keep spreading democracy and Christianity to the Muslimites (think of them as illegal immigrants with a fatwa), or the evil-doers will follow us here. I mention this because “Diamond Jim” VandeHei does a good job (You’re a good boy. Here’s a cookie.) of mapping out how this works:

The clearest sign of Bush’s September plan is that the White House has launched a new preemptive campaign to convince lawmakers the surge plan is working.

Significantly, GOP leaders are helping. This started with Bush pulling in GOP lawmakers and then leading conservative columnists last month to argue the war is going better than perceived — and to spread the word he has no plans to retreat.

It worked: Conservative outlets from the National Review to the Weekly Standard have stepped up their defense of administration policy in Iraq.

Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.), a top House GOP leader, said much more significant was an op-ed in Monday’s New York Times by two Brookings Institution scholars, Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack. The two Iraq experts contended that the surge is starting to work.

The White House blasted the op-ed to its allies within minutes of its publication — and the National Review directed its readers to the piece shortly after.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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