Frank Rich: 'It takes a Potemkin village'

[kpete]

Frank Rich: 'It takes a Potemkin village'
RAW STORY

In his latest New York Times column set for Sunday's edition, Frank Rich charts a number of recent news stories which link the Bush Administration to 'propaganda' but concludes that none of it may be working as it once did, RAW STORY has learned.

Rich points out that even though the economy appears to be 'going relatively well,' as reflected in a drop in gas prices, Bush's approval rating in this area is still low, which might be because Americans can no longer believe what they can see anymore.

Excerpts from Frank Rich's 'It takes a Potemkin village' follow:

The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of "major combat operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, "Plan for Victory," multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.

And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics -- and despite the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech itself -- Americans believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once did "Mission Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the president has "a clear plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger constituencies in America than that.

Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme -- "We will never accept anything less than complete victory" -- was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week's Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" -- a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training.

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