The Paxton Pundit - by Stacey Youdin

Go Shopping

Karl Rove told PBS's Charlie Rose the Democrats pressed for the Iraq invasion while the Republicans wanted to wait until after the 2002 elections. (There's not coffee coming out your nose, I hope.)

It was a case of life imitating art, as Orwellian as Winston Smith's job in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Besides being a patent falsehood, like the 9-11/Saddam connection, it's now out there like marker dye.

It'll take a high-dollar behaviorist to explain, if anyone besides Karl Rove can repeat that with a straight face. Andrew Card couldn't, when asked about it on one of the morning shows.

It leaves you wondering how much of the output from this administration has been of the "see what sticks" variety. You tell everyone to go shopping and keep them updated with uncomplicated story lines. Only Rove found new territory.

Did he really think that he could slip that in without so much as a fuss? Was he channeling Anne Coulter? (As if we needed two.) We'll know in a while if repetition has been able to accomplish what in single doses can't pass the smell test.

Hardly a coincidence, the Orwellian tag has been making the rounds a lot lately. In an essay by Dahr Jamail at TomDispatch, the Pentagon's "tactical perception management" gets a full airing.

The discrepancies between the official reports and eyewitness accounts of the deaths of Iraqi civilians are reminiscent of the Vietnam War. He wrote: "From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, airstrikes and attacks by the U.S. military have only killed 'militants,' 'criminals,' 'suspected insurgents,' 'IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers,' 'anti-American fighters,' "terrorists,' 'military age males,' 'armed men,' 'extremists' or 'al-Qaida.'"

Then there were meticulously contrasted case histories which brought to mind that "kill 'em all" ethos of the earlier quaqmire. Story upon story of trigger happy GI's and needless death. It was startling to read anything which comes from unfiltered reporting, outside the Green Zone.

The Pentagon has successfully managed news of the civilian carnage which some researchers put at 1.2 million (Rwanda numbers) by "covering up the trail of dead Iraqis" which serves as Jamail's title. He concludes: "Add to that the refusal of the U.S. military to bring to justice those charged with some of these heinous crimes, the lack of accountability, and an establishment media that has regularly camouflaged the true nature of the occupation, and we have the perfect setting for a continuance of industrial-scale slaughter in Iraq, even while the news highlights the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and their adventures in various rehab clinics."

The selling of the case for this war has been matched by the case for its continuation. We're still being asked to accept abstract nouns as goals. They shift faster than wardrobe changes on cable news. Have you never wondered why there aren't investigative news bunnies?

Like Karl Rove took to laughable extremes, this ongoing editing of history does meet some opposition from some of the columnists who are also good reporters. But you have to go shopping.

Next week: The Baby Who?

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