In 2003 Israeli interests commissioned a study on how to manipulate the American public to maximize US aid to Israel. The result was the WEXNER ANALYSIS: ISRAELI COMMUNICATION PRIORITIES 2003 [pdf]. One thing the study recommended was that Israel demonize Saddam Hussein and keep on demonizing him, making him the enemy, using him to scare the American people, even if he was dead.

Saddam is your best defense, even if he is dead…For a year – a SOLID YEAR – you should be invoking the name of Saddam Hussein and how Israel was always behind American efforts to rid the world of this ruthless dictator and liberate their people. Saddam will remain a powerful symbol of terror to Americans for a long time to come.

The Republicans followed that advice on Saddam but they also did it with Clinton. They demonized Bill Clinton and ran against him even after he was out of office, held him up to their supporters as everything they were against, made him the boogieman, painted him in black and red, and ignored the truth.

In the same way Obama and the Democrats need to run against Bush. Bush and Cheney were widely hated before they left office. Obama and the Democrats need to remind people of all the evil that the last administration did and remind the American people that we do not want go back to those policies or people.

It hurts Obama’s chances when he does anything Bush and Cheney would have done, from torture to deregulation, from giving money to the wealthy, to blocking help for the poor. Whenever Obama continues one of Bush’s unpopular policies it makes it that much harder to run against Bush and the Republicans.

All this bipartisan crap is bad for the Democrats. It says there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, that Republican policies are equally valid. That confuses people. When they had that health reform conference, which CNN showed all day, it gave the Republicans 8 hours to get their lies on TV and only hurt the chances for real health care reform. Whoever proposed it needs to be hunted down and fired.

The Democrats need to draw distinctions between themselves and the Republicans and make those distinctions clear. Every time Obama allows himself to be fooled by Rahm Emanual, or some other Almost-A-Republican adviser, and to compromise, to not act like a Democrat, he weakens his party’s chance of staying in office.

Be a Democrat! Run against Bush! And stop doing anything Bush would do!

How should the Democrats run?

The Bush administration had an echo chamber. It was disgusting because it was inspired by the Nazi daily parole, where the Nazis put out a message of the day to manipulate the German people. Disgusting but it worked.

The Obama administration needs to do something like that. The Democrats need to all stay on a single message on a single day – which will help them get that message in the media and help the American people to hear and understand it. But they need to remember another lesson of the Wexner Report:

Stick to your message but don’t say it the same way twice. If they [the American people] hear you repeating the exact same words over and over again, they will come to distrust your message. If your speakers can’t find different ways to express similar principles, keep them off the air.

The Democrats need an echo chamber to get through to the media, to reiterate the good things Obama is doing, but each voice needs his/her own version of that message so different people will not be repeating the same words. The Bush echo chamber was bad about doing that. The Daily Show used to show video montages of various Bush minions spouting the same message in exactly the same words. If that means the Democrats need to send a different fax to each person, each with a different wording for the Obama Administration’s Message of the Day, then that is what they need to do.

Lastly, Howard Dean needs to reappointed to head the DNC. He is one of the main reasons the Democrats took the House and Senate. Whoever has that job now is nowhere nearly as good.

Hmmm, maybe Dean needs to replace Rahm Emanual.

© alllie 2010

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.

Someone got me to watch a film on North Korea. It was a propaganda film, a film with spooky music and scary narration describing how terrible North Korea was but when I turned off the sound what I saw was a lot of monuments without people visiting them and a lot of young, pretty women. Maybe you have to be a pretty woman to be allowed to live in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

North Korea looked better to me than places like Saudi Arabia. Two things that the commies always delivered on were rights for women and education. It was clear women have more rights in North Korea than in most middle eastern countries. There were no children starving in the streets either, like in India or much of Africa. So it was hard for me to see North Korea as a monster country. True, they have made gods of their present and former leaders, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, very much like the Romans, Chinese and Japanese made gods of their rulers. Or the rulers declared themselves gods and the people didn’t laugh till they choked.

While Bush never got around to declaring himself a god, he did say he was on a mission from God and God had put him in office[1] which is similar. The statues and monuments to Kim Il-sung didn’t seem much different to me than the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorial, though lots less crowded. Or maybe everybody was at work during the times westerners were allowed to film.

The countryside filmed from a train was very pretty. The mountains and forests looked less interfered with than landscapes in the west. I have a touch of agoraphobia so I liked how sparsely populated it looked.

There are famous night time satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula with South Korea all lit up like, well, like the US, Western Europe and Japan and North Korea as dark as Africa or central Australia. I really don’t see anything that important about street lights. Streetlights, we have them to keep down crime and to help people in cars see where they are going. If you live some place with very little or no crime, almost no cars, and without a nightlife, what do you need streetlights for? In fact, I think every streetlight should be on a UV motion detector so they would only turn on when something warm and moving comes within a certain distance of them. Then our cities could be dark at night and we could see the stars again. I miss the stars. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them.

Anyway, I don’t see that the lack of streetlights in North Korea indicates the darkness of their souls or anything.

Watching the propaganda film got me to watching the North Korean Mass Games. North Korea’s Mass Games are like a Busby Berkeley musical with a cast of a hundred thousand, everyone in beautiful costumes, everyone a star in their own eyes yet part of a beautiful whole. It makes the Olympic opening ceremonies look miserly in comparison. It’s like a national art project.

That got me to thinking about Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. In Cat’s Cradle two friends, Johnson[Bokonon] and McCabe, are washed ashore on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, one of the poorest places on earth. They decided to take it over and make it a utopia. Taking over proves easy but helping people proves very difficult because of abject poverty of the island. They decide to give the people a better life by giving them a passion play to be part of. They choose the “Tyrant in the Palace and Holy Man in the Jungle” and assume those parts. What you pretend to be you become. The man playing the tyrant becomes a tyrant and the man playing the holy man becomes a holy man. The entire population becomes part of this play and it gives meaning, zest and happiness to their lives[2].

In the same way a huge part of the population of North Korea becomes part of the mass games, this national art project, this combination of carnival, halftime show and celebration of national unity. It’s inspiringly beautiful, looks like great fun and takes a lot of time. It occupies many people.

There is another play afoot, a more serious one. The “tiny righteous country menaced by evil outside forces” play. That one might get them killed.

[1] ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” Mr Bush went on: “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”

[2] Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
“…when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.”
“How did he come to be an outlaw”
“It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang…”
“McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts.
“About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in.
“And then the leaders of the remorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible.
“He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!”
“McCabe and Bokonon did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living…The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
“But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”
“So life became a work of art”

© alllie 2009

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The last week has been pretty disturbing for those of us who hope to see our country restored and its moral center reestablished. President Obama decided to participate in the torture cover up and, at the CIA and Republican’s behest, blocked the release of pictures showing torture. Then he decided to prosecute the victims of US torture in military tribunals. Military tribunals, hell. Kangaroo courts.

I think he’s afraid of the CIA. He should be. There’s evidence that Bush 41, with the help of CIA agents and assets, assassinated President Kennedy. Kennedy had threatened to break up the CIA and scatter it to the wind. He fired two CIA directors. He refused to okay Operation Northwards. He refused to use the Bay of Pigs, which he was only told about a couple of hours before it began, as an excuse to invade Cuba. He refused to send planes to support it. All those things made the CIA and the Miami Cubans very angry at him. Thus they were willing to kill him and did.

President Jimmy Carter came into office promising to clean up the CIA and stop its excesses. It is said he fired 800 CIA agents. Many of these agents immediately became assets of the GOP and use their skills to fix the election of 1980 thus putting Reagan and Bush 41 in office.

The CIA has more power than we know and much more power than it should.

Both Obama and his mother are said to have been CIA assets and perhaps CIA agents. At least they both worked, at different times, for a corporation that was known to be a CIA front, the Business International Corporation (one of whose specialties was recruiting leaders of domestic left-wing organizations as CIA assets).

So Obama may know enough about the CIA to be afraid of it but I find it very sad that he has to be, that he can not do right because of the power of evil men.

I’m particularly disturbed at the prospect of trying prisoners who have already been punished. It’s a kind of double jeopardy.

You know, from time to time we will read about a police officer or some other government official who appears to have done something wrong or illegal and is put on paid suspension while his guilt and punishment is decided. And many people think, why didn’t they just fire him? It comes down to punishment and the law. You only get one punishment for one infraction. If a police officer punches a citizen without justification and is immediately fired and no longer receives his pay his union will appeal the punishment. If they prove that he had some justification for his actions he has to be rehired without any further punishment because he has already been punished once when he lost his salary when he was fired. So instead, they suspend people like that, keep on paying them, so when they come to punish them they can. If their employer punishes them once by withholding their salary, they can’t be punished again for the same thing.

The people held by the Bush administration have already been punished. Some of them have been water boarded 88 times, probably worse than a death sentence, or 88 death sentences. So even if they are found guilty they should be released because they have already been punished. It is not right to punish them twice for the same offense. It is a kind of double jeopardy. Personally I think they should be released with a considerable amount of money to pay for their suffering, and watched. Then, if they commit another offense against the United States, they could be tried in a real court.

Let’s hope President Obama figures out a way to get the CIA under control so he is in charge, not them, and that all torture victims go free, are compensated and their torturers spend the rest of their lives in jail.

© alllie 2009

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.alllie.com/alllieblog/.