McClellan's 'Matrix' moment

[babsbunny]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-dery7-2008jun07,0,7508097.story

McClellan's 'Matrix' moment
Bush's former press secretary has stumbled out of a White House that lets political rhetoric shape reality.
By Mark Dery
June 7, 2008
Scott McClellan is having a "Matrix" moment -- the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dream world to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact.

In "The Matrix," Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion -- the computer-generated simulation that humanity experiences as reality -- to reveal the movie's post-apocalyptic world as an irradiated slag heap.

"Welcome to the Desert of the Real," he says, a riff on the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard's pronouncement, in his book "Simulations," that we live in a "desert of the real" -- an ever more virtual reality where fact and firsthand experience are displaced by media fictions. Baudrillard's example is tailor-made for the Bush presidency: "Propaganda and advertising fuse in the same marketing and merchandising of objects and ideologies," he wrote.

This, in a word, is life in the Bush administration's Ministry of Truth, as described by McClellan in his frag 'em-and-run memoir. The former White House press secretary -- whose Secret Service code name, I kid you not, was "Matrix" -- recounts how he and the rest of Team Dubya got caught up in a "permanent campaign," a nonstop propaganda war whose weapons were "the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin," and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.

[derby378]

1. If most DUers could see this, why couldn't Scottie-boy?

Was he really that naive, or was he simply greedy? I mean, I'm glad he's out and everything, but...