Views » April 21, 2006

Congenital Liars and Hypocrites

By Susan J. Douglas

The crowning achievement of the Bush administration’s first term was public relations, spin and salesmanship. So how can it be that now, in addition to everything else it has bungled or destroyed, the administration has discredited public relations itself?

Ivy Lee (a.k.a “Poison Ivy”), the “father” of public relations in the early 20th century, pioneered what was then a revolutionary PR strategy: Tell the truth, appear open and thus sympathetic, and move on. For example, Lee counseled the Pennsylvania Railroad—notorious for its refusal to provide information or interviews to reporters, especially after accidents—to admit their mistakes, vow to do better and let newspapers in on the story rather than try to suppress it. He insisted that honesty and directness were better PR tools than deception. That way, of course, as corporations have found ever since, companies could also better manage the flow of information about themselves and more subtly craft their images.

But the Bush “CEO presidency” has used every PR trick in the book—and then some—not to try to put a more favorable spin on events and policies, but to spin flat-out lies into facts. And really, this administration has not been engaging in PR. It’s been engaging in distortions and lies—in other words, propaganda—and has helped blur the line between the two.

And this is not just standard propaganda, as practiced on Voice of America, with motives that, however dubious at times, are transparent. No, this is what has been termed “black propaganda,” a practice that relies on passing false information and deceptions to a targeted group—in this case, the American public. Such psychological warfare was used by several countries in World War II. Japan, for example, dropped pamphlets in the Phillipines—ostensibly written by the U.S. Army—claiming the native women were disease-ridden.

In choosing this approach, the current administration took a nice page out of Bush Senior’s playbook. In 1990, under the coaching of PR firm Hill & Knowlton, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States posed as “Nayria” during the run-up to “Desert Storm.” She falsely testified before a Congressional caucus that Iraqi soldiers had come into a Kuwaiti hospital with guns, ripped hundreds of babies out of their incubators and left them on the cold floor to die. Not surprisingly, this helped Bush Sr. get the votes he needed for our first military adventure in Iraq.

And now, we have the revelation that Bush himself may have authorized the leak of bogus intelligence information to the press to buttress the sales pitch for invading Iraq.

Scott McClellan’s efforts to spin this make Bill Clinton’s efforts to parse the meaning of “is” seem ingenuous. McClellan argues that even though Bush has been emphatic about denouncing leaks, it was OK for Bush to do it because this leak was in the interest of national security. Passing misinformation that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons to the likes of Times reporter Judy Miller did not “compromise national security,” McClellan insisted in an April 8 press briefing.

In light of the subsequent diversion of Americans’ attention away from al Qaeda and toward Iraq, the unnecessary deaths of our soldiers, the rise in terrorism in the region and the engorged hatred of Americans that resulted from the invasion, it seems fair to say Bush’s actions had a devastating effect on national security.

So why is there not a much more outraged and robust movement for impeachment?

Of course, the quick answer is that Republicans control the House and Senate. Still, (through a clear failure of imagination) I never thought anyone in my lifetime would be worse than Nixon, but Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld actually are. Lying to Congress and the public in order to invade Iraq, illegally spying on and wiretapping Americans, authorizing torture and renditions, trying to strip Americans of their rights by seeking to detain people without access to legal counsel, the indefinite detention of non-citizens against whom no formal specific charges have been made and, possibly, leaking the name of a CIA operative all seem to be worthy of impeachment hearings. But that’s just the propaganda of the left, right?

Here we see the deeper reason that calls for censure and impeachment are floundering. One of the deep consequences of the relentless Bush propaganda is that millions of people now struggle daily to figure out what actually are facts and what is spin. In this environment, everything is spin, and laws and facts are cast as debatable, mere opinions. Everything is partisan, everything “framed.”

Team Bush has not just discredited itself by over-reaching on the propaganda front, allowing reporters, bloggers and activists to repeatedly reveal them as congenital liars and hypocrites. They have contaminated public debate by implying that there is never any truth to be known.

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• Reader Comments

  I am happy to see the author got this one right!

  “Lying to Congress and the public in order to invade Iraq, illegally spying on and wiretapping Americans, authorizing torture and renditions, trying to strip Americans of their rights by seeking to detain people without access to legal counsel, the indefinite detention of non-citizens against whom no formal specific charges have been made and, possibly, leaking the name of a CIA operative all seem to be worthy of impeachment hearings. But that’s just the propaganda of the left, right?”

  Yep, pretty much it is exactly that - propaganda of the left. Which is why there will be no impeachment (the real reason that impeachment is even mentioned being rather obvious - payback for the Clinton impeachment, and escalated by the distraught liberals since the loss of the elections in 2000 and 2004).

  Posted by wolf on Apr 20, 2006 at 4:15 PM

  So…

  1. Indefinite Detention of Non-citizens.
  2. Intentionally Misrepresenting the threat of Iraqi WMDs.
  3. Domestic spying without suitable warrants.
  4. ‘Authorizing’ media leaks.
  5. Being, in general, an incompetent leader.

  Which of these do you claim to be false?

  “The Left” must have one hell of a propaganda machine to have caused other Republicans to distance themselves from Bush for fear of the looming backlash.

  Posted by Harrower on Apr 20, 2006 at 4:40 PM

  Good question Harrower.

  I think your item 1 is actually a good thing. Enemy combatants can sit in Cuba and rot. I have no problem with that.

  Item 2 i claim to be false. (BTW - Do you feel that Roosevelt led the uS into WWII with full disclosure to the American people, just out of curiousity?)

  Item 3 will be decided by the courts. In any case, i know of no personal gain Bush gets from this. Do you?

  For 4, the president can authorize leaks as he chooses. No big deal.

  I will give you 5 though. But still a large improvement over some former presidents (Jimmy Carter comes immediately to mind. However, while he was an incredibly inept president, he is perhaps the best ex-president we have now.) In any case, we elected him instead of the bozo windsurfer (i would have wished both parties could have found better candidates, sigh).

  Don’t kid yourself, The Left is not really good at anything, including propaganda. This is, in my mind, unfortunate. We really could use a party that championed such ideals as “economic justice” and “fiscal responsibility” and “clean politics”. But, unfortuantely, we have just the Dems and the Repubs. Both just looking after their own, to the detriment of the country.

  Posted by wolf on Apr 20, 2006 at 6:11 PM

  In response to Wolf:

  1.  Who decides what an “enemy combatant” is?  Are you comfortable allowing Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to make that determination?  How many innocent people are you willing to allow to “rot” in Guantanamo Bay in order to make sure that we’ve got the bad guys?  Five?  20?  100?

  2.  It’s interesting that when people try to defend Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they always try to bring the actions of ex-presidents into the discussion—presumably in an effort to divert the discussion.  Bush lied about Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from Africa.  He said Iraq’s aluminum tubes were for uranium enrichment, when the intelligence agencies had clearly stated that they were not.  He falsely described a link between Iraq and al Qaida.  He said that Iraqi drones had the capability drop a biological or chemical weapon within minutes.  We were told that the locations of the chemical and biological weapons were known.  Bush told us that we were in imminent danger of being attacked by Iraq and that the “final proof” might come “in the form of a mushroom cloud.”  After the invasion, he claimed that we had found a mobile biological weapons lab.  These lies were attempts to garner support for an invasion that was illegal, unncessary, and unwarranted.  In my mind, there could not be more serious grounds for impeachment.  You may “claim [these facts] to be false,” but then, who is the propagandist here?  You or me?  Each one of these lies is easily documentable.

  3.  Bush broke the law (FISA) when he authorized domestic warrantless wiretaps.  Does one have to prove that Bush gained personally from this in order to prove that it was illegal? 

  4.  The president has the authority to leak certain kinds of information.  In other cases, he must consult first with the appropriate agencies.  Legal experts are divided about Bush’s authority to leak the classified information that he did.  In any case, Bush cherry-picked the intelligence he authorized to have leaked to the press, just as he cherry-picked the intelligence in the lead-up to war against Iraq.  This decision was based not on concerns for national security, but to bolster his case for war.  Not an impeachable offense, I think, but morally reprehensible.

  5.  So you think that Bush is a more competent leader than the “bozo windsurfer” (presumably Kerry)?  This is a matter of opinion, of course.  But I’ll take Kerry’s steady, even-handed diplomatic style over Bush’s reckless, blundering unilateralism anytime.  Same with Al Gore.  Those two candidates didn’t have Bush’s frat-boy charm, but I would have trusted either one of them with the important decisions that have been bungled by the Bush administration.  I mean, are you really suggesting that Kerry’s awkward windsurfing attempts say anything about his presidential potential?  Ever been mountain biking with Bush?

  You forgot to mention Bush’s authorization of torture, his administration’s outing of a CIA operative in an effort to intimidate a whistleblower, and the Pentagon’s failure to plan for Iraq after the toppling of the Batthist regime.

  I agree that the Left may not be very good at propaganda, but then again, this is not a skill that I value very highly.  I value integrity, compassion, and leadership.  That’s why I vote for Democrats instead of Republicans.

  Posted by buzzdainer on Apr 21, 2006 at 11:27 PM

  This story reminds me of another article by Jim Lobe (2003) Leo Strauss’ Philosophy of Deception. Lobe explored the connection between the ideas of Strauss and Abram Shulsky, the man hired by Wolfowitz to serve as the director of the Office of Special Plans created to find evidence of WMD. In the same article Seymour Hersch, who wrote an article for the New York Times, stated that Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt

  “criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment.” They argued that Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.” As Lobe continues

  “Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that ‘those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior’.”

  This veiw also reinforces the inherent contradictions in the politico-religious platform of conservatives, or as Ronald Bailey noted, the notion that “Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers.” The author cites William Kristol as an example.

  As revealed in the current issue of In These Times, in the article on Monson, the need to intimidate and threaten Americans who are exercising free speech to criticize the Bush administration is part of a Straussian propaganda campaign to keep people in cinque with a dominant ideology. This ideology depends upon the force of the state to quell any opposition, since it is opposition that exposes the falsehoods of an absolute enemy:

  “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” Strauss once wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people.”

  In this sense, unity is disguised as a form of particularism, since unity in the true sense of the word, never loses sight of another person’s humanity. Yet this binary oppositional stance maintains that unity is predicated on disunity, that love cannot exist without hatred.

  This is a scary worldview, yet it sums up the current adminstration, which has allowed lies to function in the place of truth, where the justification of violence is used to quell violence?

  Posted by Epistrophy on Apr 22, 2006 at 4:06 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 21 posts.

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