FRANK RICH-McCain/Palin Using Same Tactics To Win Election As Bushco Used To Sell War

[kpete]

Op-Ed Columnist
Truthiness Stages a Comeback
Frank Rich: McCain/Palin sold just like the war.

By FRANK RICH
Published: September 20, 2008

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When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

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The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[dkf]

1. How in the world do you accumulate 1173 pages of medical history anyway?

Damn.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. Just say no to liars.

One can only hope that the american public, not reknown for its astuteness, is really not so stupid as to buy the same bullshit barrage they bought the last time.

Economic carnage may be derailing the Bullshit Express for now, but they will get that crap back on track sooner or later.

[Cha]

3. mccain's like.."hey, it worked for stupid..

why not sell me and the gimmick here like the country sucked down the war ON Iraq with no small part played by the corporate media?"

[ROakes1019]

6. and . . .

McCain is running his campaign just like the one that beat him--Bush's in 2000. After all, he has Rove and most of Bush's thugs helping him this time. How could any halfway intelligent person see McCain as anything but more of the same--a disaster waiting to happen? The difference this time--Bush has so nearly wrecked this country that a little bit more from McCain and we might never dig out from under the damage.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. 1173 pages? That's pretty damn scary. n/t

[FrenchieCat]

5. In other words, McCain is just about a bunch of lies.....