Is Dick Cheney high on drugs???

[Usually Lurkin]

yes. Dick Cheney controlled everyone's thoughts for much of the 2000s, or 70% of those polled, at least.

[dalmations202]

Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin

yes. Dick Cheney controlled everyone's thoughts for much of the 2000s, or 70% of those polled, at least.

Question? If Dick Cheney controlled the minds of the sheeple, so that 70% of them believed a lie --- then what percentage of the masses are believing a lie from the current administration?

I mean, let's face it Cheney has very little charisma, and is hard pressed to get people to follow him, yet he and Bush had 70% of the people believing them. This is with a media that historically favors the other side.

So if Cheney got 70% to believe a lie, what percent CAN/WILL/IS the new administration get to believe?

Personally since Reagan (and probably including him and before -- I just wasn't paying attention at that time in my life) ---- ALL of them have been crooked. They all treat the American citizens like sheep, and lead them around by their noses - off to slaughter. People are just too stupid to realize that their bickering about it just keeps them from realizing the truth. IMO, there is more false information out there, that there is truth. Truth is extremely hard to find these days.

[Usually Lurkin]

Originally Posted by dalmations202

So if Cheney got 70% to believe a lie, what percent CAN/WILL/IS the new administration get to believe?.

I don't know, but if I could cross up threads a bit, maybe instead of a poll tax, we really should implement a poll poll: "Do you make logical leaps off of official government statements? No? Come vote. Yes? Go home."

[alexamenos]

Originally Posted by dalmations202

Question? If Dick Cheney controlled the minds of the sheeple, so that 70% of them believed a lie --- then what percentage of the masses are believing a lie from the current administration?

I mean, let's face it Cheney has very little charisma, and is hard pressed to get people to follow him, yet he and Bush had 70% of the people believing them. This is with a media that historically favors the other side.

So if Cheney got 70% to believe a lie, what percent CAN/WILL/IS the new administration get to believe?

The big reason I found the Darth Cheney / 70% thing so interesting is because before the run-up to Iraq War (v2.0) I had really been studying up on my propaganda. Operation Iraq Liberation was an amazing piece of propaganda.

Of course, the US Government doesn't engage in homeward propaganda... (the devil's best trick was convincing people he doesn't exist, or something like that). If you step back far enough it's almost comical -- we're talking about the world's largest government, a government which routinely hires armies and armies of pr consultants and marketing firms and then brags after the fact about spin jobs and 'psy-ops'....

...one event comes to mind -- the toppling of Saddam's statue. Remember that? The mainstream dolts we're virtually breathless that day describing it as some historic event in the history of freedom....it was wall to wall freedom and flagwaving day as they played over and over and over again the historic out-pouring of spontaneous liberty love .... and a few months later some army psy-ops group issued a reporting saying, 'we did it and this is how we did it', so now you don't see the downfall of Saddam's statue in the highlight reels.

That's one of the more egregious examples, but the point is that propaganda by and for the US Government is constant and quite good (good meaning effective and skilled, not good meaning not evil).

How good is it? Anyone who uses the phrase "US Government propaganda" is immediately moved into the kook category, because only someone teetering on the edge of mental instability could imagine that our beloved government engages in something which has been a very high priority for every other government since the dawn of man.

anyhoo...to answer your question, the Bush administration was very good with their propaganda, better than Obama has been thus far imo -- the fawning deference by the msm to Obama doesn't really help him in this regard because...well...because they're just preaching to the choir by this point.

....for instance....when Darth Cheney and the boys fed Judith Miller all kinds of Dubya Emm Dee stuff so that she'd run one NY Times article after another on the horrors of Saddam's Dubya Emm Dees, that 'worked' because NY Times had the reputation of being the anti-Bush (deserved), anti-War (decidedly undeserved) paper of record. Doesn't work this way for Obama....

....so I don't think it's a given that Obama can march us willingly over a cliff any faster than Bush. If he effs things up badly enough (as he's doing with the economy), I think you might see things turn on him pretty quickly.

[Usually Lurkin]

Originally Posted by alexamenos

Anyone who uses the phrase "US Government propaganda" is immediately moved into the kook category,

I think you oversell yourself. Everyone knows that every government uses propaganda. It's the assumption of propaganda for fitting your political motives that's kooky. It's the "Cheney is a propagandist! OOOhh Boogedy Boogey" rather than "Cheney may have preferred that a unified message come from the high political offices" that is kooky.

[alexamenos]

Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin

I think you oversell yourself. Everyone knows that every government uses propaganda. It's the assumption of propaganda for fitting your political motives that's kooky. It's

my assumption* is that the propaganda, in the case under discussion, was for the purposes of selling a war.

is that an unreasonable assumption in your view?

(btw....I use "Darth Cheney" as a symbol of the Bush Administration/Military-Industrial-Complex, etc., etc... out of laziness, not because I think the funny dark little man with the baboon heart was pulling all of the strings)

[Usually Lurkin]

Originally Posted by alexamenos

my assumption* is that the propaganda, in the case under discussion, was for the purposes of selling a war.

is that an unreasonable assumption in your view?

no, not unreasonable. It's so reasonable that I don't understand why you are trying to make boogymen out of people who use propaganda. I'd be more afraid of a government that went to war without propaganda than one that goes to war with it.

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?)

[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.

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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.

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...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.