Bush's strategy is all PR and propaganda...

[kentuck]

He plans on a lot of photo-ops that depict reality in a fraudelent way. It is fake politics. So long as the media doesn't show the real terrain, they know they can fool the people. That is their plan. With their PR machine and Rove's propaganda techniques, they plan on fooling enough people before the election to keep it close and to keep Dubya safe in a majority. They will withhold nothing at their disposal. Billy sticks and steel knuckles if necessary. So long as the media do not pan the area, they have the capability and the will to paint a pretty picture that ain't...

[AndyA]

1. Bush has no strategy. It's all clever slogans, photography, and custom

backdrops. There is no substance to anything. It's all for show. It's only surface deep, there is nothing of substance below.

[Not_Giving_Up]

3. No strategy

He has STRATAGERY...remember?

[liberal N proud]

2. When you have control of the media, you can run on propaganda

The only agenda the bu$h regime has ever had is to destroy the democracy that has been the governing system in the US for more than 200 years. The rest is all bull shit.

[Avalux]

4. Absolutely -

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

[kentuck]

5. They can only succeed if the media assists them...

If the media shows the facts, this Administration will be exposed for what they are...

[Hidden Stillness]

6. It "Works" Because it is All the Same Group Now

The kind of "politics" that Bush and the modern Republican Party practice and can get away with today, only exists and works because the media--owned completely by them now--is the way it is. The media itself now lives in a world of fantasy. Selling and hyping, grinning about "the popular new drug" or "new technology, that you can buy now too," delivering audiences for their sponsors, and worrying about the stockholders and corporate profits; inventing one "new fad sweeping the country" after another, but only if there was a commercial product associated with it. An endless parade of "experts" on this and that topic, posing and selling their books and consulting firms, but with no real credentials. Media now is just a product-moving arm of the larger, global corporate marketing system, cut off totally from the society where it was located (or not located, nowadays); where the "anchors" and "reporters" themselves are presented more for their "images," like the associated, advertised products, than any actual journalistic background or skill anyone may really have. As a matter of fact, as with all "entertainment"-type media, real writers are considered troublemakers,and the enemy. The media has not been "the press," covering "the news," at least since the '80s when they were taken over by increasingly consolidated ownership, cut all their staff, reporting bureaus, etc., and concentrated completely on "news stars," "scoops," post-production technology, and etc.

I was thinking about this a little while ago, about what is wrong with every single story and why they do not even want facts anymore, and one thing struck me a specific way: they do not even refer to the objective world and report things by an account of them; they do not tell the news anymore, they characterize it. They have accomplished a shift of emphasis on the telling of everything, so that none of them, hour after hour of listening to the "news," even does the hard work of researching and digging up the facts on a story, but instead they all, as a group, run prancing from one "big huge hit story" to another, investigating nothing, just interviewing each other on it. (Then when they screw it up, they blame everyone else, then censor them.) It almost seems it is a way for them to exploit 24-hour-a-day commercial air-time, and yet not work, and recycle the same material over, and over, and over, like the same commercial dough recipe that goes for fruit pies, and chicken pot pies, and tuna pie, and on, and on, and on. What matters, suddenly, is not the real-world, provable fact of the thing, but what the media "experts" THINK of it, and say about it.

This is how a campaign like the lying slander against John Kerry during the 2004 "election" for months on end can pass as "news coverage" when it was the media's own attack: the game was "people are talking about this--is it real? what do you think?" etc. Opinions themselves become the ongoing "news" flow. This then takes the next step, where now the corporate media, representing the interests of rich corporate management Republicans and no one else, can give you a non-stop, heavily politicized propaganda indoctrination, with no break and no relief, and now pretend it was news itself, because now all coverage is of this non-stop blathering type.

What has Bush actually done, after all these years, to help with one single domestic issue? How many crimes, how much graft, how many destroyed Federal departments, how many destroyed whistle-blowing employees who tried to help...? No one even refers to "quaint, old-fashioned," "reality-based" coverage such as this. Now all is mind-control that passes as casual gab, censorship that passes as "we only cover what's popular, what sells," and an era that has witnessed corporate criminality and the destruction of the middle class and poor, and all the legal and governmental structures that protected them for a hundred years, the worst since the Gilded Age, totally unreported and covered over with a pseudo-"friendly" media grin, because the criminals, the murderers of our society, now own the only "public square."

With a completely corporate recasting of every "public" "fact" that ever was, Bush, Cheney, Rove and that type, actually fit right in there, and seem normal. It is their setting. When you have no contact anymore with a truthful telling of the things of our Nation, but only spin and glitz and selling, then the phoniest, most corporate thing, is actually the only thing possible. Anything real is jarring, and will be laughed off.