Whiskey Bar: Send in the Clowns: "Send in the Clowns
It looks like the Cheney administration is finally getting serious about losing the war in Iraq -- it's sending in the radio talk show hosts:
A contingent of conservatives talk radio hosts is headed to Iraq this month on a mission to report 'the truth' about the war: American troops are winning, despite headlines to the contrary.
The 'Truth Tour' has been pulled together by the conservative Web cast radio group Rightalk.com and Move America Forward, a non-profit conservative group backed by a Republican-linked public relations firm in California.
If the Iraqi insurgents are smart -- and most of them are fucking geniuses compared to your average right-wing talk show host -- they'll spread the word: Leave these particular dumb ass infidels alone. (Not that any of them are likely to poke their porcine snouts outside the green zone without a brigade-strength escort. But you never know where the odd mortar round is going to land.)
Why? Because collectively, these guys are an enormously valuable asset to America's enemies -- both because of their utterly brainless support for Al Qaeda's strategy of turning the war against terrorism into a crusade against Islam, and because they've done such a splendid job of setting up the American people to be demoralized and disillusioned by the truth.
Anthony Cordesman, the conservative but reality-based Iraq analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides a good thumbnail description of Al Qaeda's war strategy in his most recent report, Iraq's Evolving Insurgency:
The goal of Bin Laden and those like him is not to persuade the US or the West, it is rather to so alienate them from the Islamic and Arab world that the forces of secularism in the region will be sharply undermined, and Western secular influence can be controlled or eliminated. The goal of most Iraqi insurgents is narrower -- drive the US and its allies out of Iraq -- but involve many of the same methods.
As it happens, the paid propagandists of wing nut radio have the same objective -- to promote a clash of civilizations. They do it by playing up every atrocity committed by the insurgents while ignoring every display of massive overkill (like the flattening of Fallujah) committed by the U.S. military, by glorifying torture and degradation (I Heart Gitmo), by demonizing Islam as a "gutter" religion and the Arabs as a subhuman species, and in general by being the loudest, most obnoxious assholes on the face of the earth. Walking billboards for anti-Americanism, in fact.
And they do these things for much the same reason Bin Ladin rants about Zionists and crusaders: because it gets good ratings. Spewing hatred over the airwaves 24/7 keeps the true believers in a permanent froth, drowning out any doubts about the party line and the party elite. This, in turn, makes it easer to paint dissent as treason and criticism of the Cheney administration as support for terrorism. It's all fairly conventional totalitarian stuff -- which is why I tend to think of wing nut radio as the living embodiment of Ingsoc's slogan: Ignorance is Strength."
