[alexamenos]

Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin

What I find unreasonable are your leaps of logic: If it can be polled, it must be successful propaganda. If it is propaganda, it must be feared. Dick Cheney (Bush-Military Complex) use propaganda any differently (or more evilly) than anyone else. People don't think the government uses propaganda (that one's hard to fathom even as a leap. What did you leap off of to get that?)

I think you make alot of leaps of logic regarding my ostensible leaps of logic. In reverse order...

People don't think the government uses propaganda....

Yes, lot's of people don't think the government uses propaganda, but more importantly even more people underappreciate the scope and ....ummm.... hegemony of government propaganda.

So let's go back a few years, to the time when Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled. I'm not bragging on myself when I say that it literally took me one viewing of the event to become quite suspicious, two viewings and a quick click on the 'net to be certain. It was as obviously propaganda as when american flag waving Kuwaitis lined the streets in '91 to greet US soldiers. To be blunt, the event was comical in its transparency.

Straight up, how long did it take you to recognize that this was a government staged event? 10 minutes? A day? Five or six years? Never?
How many folks recognized it as propaganda at the time? I'd venture to say a very small minority....point being, people may 'know' that governments engage in propaganda, but if they don't know it well enough to recognize it when they're being slapped in the face with it they may as well not know it at all.

Dick Cheney (Bush-Military Complex) use propaganda any differently (or more evilly) than anyone else.

I don't think I've said anything to this effect other than they're quite good at it...and that's a tactical assessment not a value judgement. I will gladly concede the point that Darth Cheney and Bush don't use propaganda more evilly than Goebbels.

If it is propaganda, it must be feared.

I don't think I've said anything to this effect at all. I'd sooner say that a used car salesman's pitch is something to be feared--I'd say instead that it's something to be recognized. If a used car salesman tells you that a little old lady owned the car and she only drove it to church on Sundays, you might bear in mind that the dude has a vested interest in selling you a car.

What I find unreasonable are your leaps of logic: If it can be polled, it must be successful propaganda.

and this would be your most unreasonable leap of logic in that you wrongly jump to the notion that i've made such a leap of logic.

I base this opinion on months and months of very careful observation, not on some ad hoc leap of faith.

.
.
.


fwiw....one of my favorite tactics by Darth Cheney et al was this thing where they'd "anonymously" leak a story to a reporter and then go on TV to "admit" that the leak was "true" (in Karl Rove's faith-based world, that is).

You could damn near set your calendar by it -- the senior official would leak the story to NY Times on Wednesday, it'd get a couple of days of play before it was 'verified' on Sunday politico shows, then the story would get shot down quietly on Monday and Tuesday of the following week...damage done.

--------------

...another interesting propaganda tidbit / trivia on Operation Iraqi Liberation....when did the war begin?

If you said February something in 2003 when Comical Ari Fleischer announced that we were ridding the world of the evil yrant Saddam, then I think you're off by a few months. For months before that, including when those twits in congress were pretending to debate the matter, we were flying all sorts of missions into Iraq...knocking shit out, killing people, fighting with Iraq's military...you know, war kind of stuff. The overt kind of thing may have started in Feb 2003, but for all intents and purposes we were waging war on Iraq by October of 2002.

I actually think the full scale attack was delayed for a couple of months for logistical reasons more than haggling at the UN or in Congress....the saud's had to make a show of not letting US attach from Mecca and then the freaking turks did their thing...but that's a whole 'nother story.

sorry for the ramble...just kind of interesting stuff imo.