And So Do A Lot of Iraqis And American Soldiers
The TV stations in Maine are saturated with the pro-war propaganda commercials just now. Its in an effort to sway the votes of the “moderate” Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe as well as John Sununu who is not “moderate” but who has to run in the changed New Hampshire which is. The most shameful of these ads selling a lemon of a war is the one that uses the double amputee who says unless a lot more people get killed to prop up the mythological Iraqi “government” then his sacrifice will have been in vain. How bad is this piece of propaganda? It directly sells the old Bush lie about Iraq being tied to the September eleventh attacks. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to make a real connection between this all out, Republican propaganda effort with the scheduled Petraeus fraud in a few weeks. It’s all the same old kind of packaging, to extend the disastrous Bush war with temporary lies and Madison Avenue’s patented heart string tugs.
Will it be answered? Not effectively. The effect of court rulings granting corporations “speech rights”, making money equal to speech and the Reagan era destruction of the principle of fairness in broadcasting makes it certain that the corporate interests who support the Republicans in anything they do. No matter how much it damages the interests of the American People and hundreds of millions around the world can sell any lie to accomplish its purposes. Real speech in the world as it is means broadcast speech, something that is effectively non-existent for the anti-war side. Until the legal fiction of corporate personhood is destroyed, until the media is forced to serve the interest of the truth instead of its own profits, until the American People stop buying slick, cheap emotional appeals instead of the truth, there is no use in pretending that we are a free people living in a democracy. For those who are still chanting the "more speech" mantra, you are idiots and dupes pretending that we live in the print era.
Will it work? There is every reason to believe that it will give those Republicans in the house and Senate who could make the difference between sustaining Bush’s vetoes and beginning to end the most idiotic, mendacious, and criminal foreign adventure in the history of corrupt, inept administrations of the United States, the excuse and cover they need to keep his war going.