The TBL Tweet of the Day is from Garry Kasparov

Nobody gave @Kasparov63 any serious competition today for TrueBlueLiberal.org's tweet of the day:

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) December 13, 2016

Happy Psychedelic Fourth of July from the US Information Agency (1975)

WHIG of the Week Scott McClellan (Part Two, The Video)

I just watched more of Bill O'Reilly than I've seen in my life in watching this video, "O'Reilly Goes Ballistic on McClellan," but you can skip right to the 3'29" marker to hear the section that's most relevant to the purposes of the WHIGgate Update blog.



Here's the transcript of the section about "catapulting the propaganda" using the White House Iraq Group, as transcribed in Crooks and Liars:

Bill O’Reilly: You said they used propaganda and that is a loaded word.
Scott McClellan: The White House Iraq group, the White House Iraq Group was set up, it’s a marketing arm for selling the a war. That was a specific purpose that I talked about in the book
BO: Because they fervently believed that the guy was a danger and could hand his weapons off.
SM: No because the President had a bigger driving motivation which was to transform the middle east.
BO: You telling me that President Bush didn’t believe they had the,
SM: No, he did too. He believed that too.
BO:That’s not propaganda then, that’s not propaganda.
SM: It is when you package it all together—over sell it and over state it to the American people. That is propaganda.

Propaganda may be a loaded word in O'Reilly's mind, but Scott McClellan gets his definition of the word directly from his former boss:

... third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. 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. (Applause.)

-- George W. Bush, 24 May 2005 (text and stage cues from the whitehouse.gov transcript)

You can see a video of the Catapult the Propaganda quote here.

If you can stand watching the whole interview video, it's also interesting to see the way that O'Reilly goes on about how "everyone" believed Iraq had WMDs because they read it in The New York Times; I just wish that Scott would have pointed out how Judith Miller of the Times was being used as a tool -- perhaps the key tool -- in the catapulting the propaganda about Saddam's scary aluminum tubes.

crossposted from WHIGgate Update at whiggate.org

BAN WAR TOYS -- Liberal Moral Value of the Day

Look at this if you dare (after all, you're paying for it) --"America's Army®" - Taxpayer-supported war games to train and brainwash the future cannon fodder of America

It was bad enough when our kids had to pay for (or beg their parents to buy) their first-person shooter games, now they can get them for free, with links to recruiters. I guess the Pentagon wasn't reaching the market penetration they needed at the local videogame stores. I had heard about this, but I stumbled on the link and I couldn't believe how bad it really was (I didn't play the "game", but its ominous splash screen is enough to make you puke).

Here's the #1 moral value of True Blue Liberal -- Don't teach our kids how to kill (until you draft them), especially not with our tax dollars. Can you imagine how hateful this website must look to anyone living outside the walls of America??

"Proverbs for Paranoids, 3"

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Thank you [Mr. President]. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines. And Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.

--"Reporter" Jeff Gannon asks George Bush a tough question at a news conference on 26 Jan 2005 [click for more details at Media Matters for America]

How much, to continue the entry from a couple of days ago, is HE being paid to help keep us all in the dark?

-- True Blue Liberal