Information Is Treason

[Chicago Democrat]

Information Is Treason
Why Bush is worse than Reagan.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, March 16, 2004, at 4:51 PM PT


"Facts are stupid things," President Ronald Reagan said in a famous self-parodying moment. (He'd meant to say "facts are stubborn things.") At the time, a common criticism of the Reagan presidency was that the Gipper tended to ignore facts and act instead according to the dictates of ideology. Since then, sentimental revisionists have come to praise Reagan for paying facts little heed.

Although it flatters President George W. Bush to suggest he possesses anything so grand as an ideology, Dubya emulates the Reagan technique. But he's advanced it one bold step further. Rather than simply ignore information, Bush and his minions have resolved to suppress it or, better yet, to prevent it from being created in the first place. The following three examples illustrate Bush's unique contribution to the war against empiricism, which continues to escalate.

The Pentagon Spanking. In the January/February issue of the Atlantic, James Fallows reported that in May 2002 the Central Intelligence Agency began a series of war games aimed at predicting conditions in Iraq after the ousting of Saddam Hussein. This was, in light of the chaos that later descended on Iraq after the United States victory, a very wise thing to do. Citing "a person familiar with the process," Fallows wrote,

One recurring theme in the exercises was the risk of civil disorder after the fall of Baghdad….The CIA…considered whether a new Iraqi government could be put together through a process like the Bonn conference, which was then being used to devise a post-Taliban regime for Afghanistan. At the Bonn conference representatives of rival political and ethic groups agreed on the terms that established Hamid Karzai as the new Afghan President. The CIA believed that rivalries in Iraq were so deep, and the political culture so shallow, that a similarly quick transfer of sovereignty would only invite chaos.

This analysis turned out to be correct. One year after the invasion, Iraq is not yet self-governing. Back in May 2002, though, the Pentagon took a very dim view of the CIA war games:

rest at:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2097268/

[HEFFA]

1. Manufacturing reality has turned into a virtual industry for these guys

Great post!

You might also be interested in the most recent book from John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, "Weapons of Mass Deception." It deals with these very issues, especially where the Bush boys are concerned. The PR industry is enormously influential in this country, and most people don't even realize it. One example: Remember the whole Mad Cow thing that we heard about here in the states a while back? What ever happened with that? I wonder if the PR industry for the beef industry might have played in role in stifling that?!

For more on the mad cow issue, check out Stauber and Rampton's "Mad Cow USA." The full text is available free for download as a PDF document here: http://www.prwatch.org/books/madcow.html

These guys were talking about this YEARS ago!