Rich: Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/opinion/19rich.html?ei=5065&en=3fbb1dacd4d13ade&ex=1119758400&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

<snip>

But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush's 60-stop Social Security "presidential roadshow," his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn't repeated the success of "Ask the President." Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise's desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."

The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.

This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.

Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.

[Cha]

1. Eww I bet tom cruise loves

being clumped with bush and his titanic SS tour!

Goes to show ya that celebs should't live out their romances in the media AND chimperors shouldn't start wars based on LIES for oil, power and contracts in the Middle East.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Slightly off topic - there was a fascinating BBC radio programme

just recently, about a hoax broadcast they did in 1926.

On January 16, 1926, one Father Ronald Knox, a catholic priest, interrupted an apparently genuine BBC talk on 18th century literature with a report that Big Ben had been toppled by trench mortars, the Savoy Hotel torched, and a Government minister lynched.

The Russian revolution was then less than a decade old, the General Strike already in preparation.

In this febrile atmosphere, many took Knox's satire seriously, besieging the BBC with worried phone calls. Bad weather delayed delivery of the next day's papers, giving rural listeners prolonged reason to assume the capital was in flames.

The BBC made several announcements later that evening that the progamme had been 'a burlesque' but these assurances went largely unheard

http://www0.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/the_riot_that_never_was.shtml

And a piece by the programme's presenter: http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ifs/hi/newsid_4080000/newsid_4081000/4081060.stm

Apparently, when Welles was castiagted for his War of the Worlds, he said something like "well, the technique has been used elsewhere before" - possibly referring to this episode. And John Reith, the head of the BBC, who is now a byword for high-minded puritan values, said he wanted more of the same, since listener letters were 10-to-1 in favour of the programme. Oh, and:

"The New York Times even sneered at the naïve British for being taken in by such an obvious spoof."

[The Icon Painter]

3. Side Note

Father Ronald Knox was one of the earliest of the intellectual elite who came to make up The Baker Street Irregulars. His scholarly dissertations on various aspects of the Holmes history delighted readers and listeners for years. I had not heard of his involvement in this prank and am grateful to the poster for enlightening me.

[bunkerbuster1]

4. Fascinating, thanks. And the FCC should note:

I read that the Beeb received 249 complaints about the program. And yet they didn't genuflect and ask forgiveness, nor did the British government fine them, nor did Parliament hold investigations...

just sayin'.

[Democrats_win]

5. FR is brilliant! Soon everyone will consider bush a complete liar.

[Puzzler]

6. Good article...

... as usual by Frank Rich. He's one of the best at the NYT.

-P