The Art of Politics Is…

The following has been said in various forms of print; Politics is the art of the possible, the art of the sell, the art of compromise, the art of persuasion, the art of looking for trouble, etc.

My favorite quote comes from the late Hunter S. Thompson who said, shortly before he died, “Politics is the art of controlling your environment”. However, that quote would have been even more spot-on if he’d used the word ‘manipulating’ in place of ‘controlling’.

With September 11^th coming up you will have the perfect opportunity to witness public manipulation as news stations will undoubtedly be breaking out their stock footage of the towers smoking and crumbling into non-existence. There will be interviews shown with World Trade Center survivors, family members of those who perished, and service-people who responded to the hellish scene that fateful morning. Why not? It makes for great TV which, in turn, makes for higher ratings. The news media will manipulate their viewers by means of nostalgia and sentimentality. They will forgo reporting issues of today in favor of tearing open old wounds, and grinding salt in them for good measure. Round and round we go.

One of the enduring images of the Iraq War was the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Remember the footage? An impromptu gathering of Iraqis at the foot of the statue suddenly turned heated as the Iraqis began to wail on the base of the statue. Chunks of the statue went flying, and the crowd went into a frenzy. It seemed that the Iraqi people were relishing in their sudden freedom from the dictator immortalized by the statue. It seemed that the whole thing was spontaneous act of a crowd that was not going to take it anymore. Yes, it seemed that way, and there is good reason for that.

There is a documentary out titled, “PsyWar: The Real Battlefield is the Mind”, in which the existence of Psychological Warriors is examined. Psy-Warriors are basically CIA-trained operatives who have entrenched themselves in high profile news media outlets, such as CNN and Fox News, to help deliver the “news”. They are Public Relations people for government agenda. It is their job to make sure that the public is fed images and data that would seem to validate otherwise objectionable actions taken by the government.

One of the more visible ‘Public Relations’ contributions by these Psy-Warriors to date, as told by numerous insiders and experts in the film, was the toppling of the Hussein statue. Very basically, the jubilant crowd of Iraqis at the foot of the statue were not actually Iraqis. They were actually a team of actors, for lack of a better term, who were flown into Iraq specifically to film this poignant moment.

Quotes and thoughts from the film can more than fill up this entire space, but you would be much better served if you actually watched the film for yourself here…

One thing is for certain, you will never watch the news the same way again.