While wandering through the blogosphere I came across this post at Down with Tyranny in which Howie Klein discusses the recent spate of official factfinding visits to Iraq, during which the visitor is squired around the green zone and fed a line of bull by the military. These folks, most of them already war supporters, come back to tell us that things are going swimmingly. Some might say (though no one will) that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As Yogi said, it’s deja vu all over again. Those of us who watched the Vietnam War from start to finish will recall that the same sort of thing happened during Vietnam. George Romney, Mitt’s father, famously complained that he had been brainwashed on one such trip. Things haven’t changed much. Having made the fatal mistake of telling the truth, albeit somewhat awkwardly, his political career was destroyed.
Of course, the brainwashing techniques were cruder then, and far less effective than those used today. Another advantage today’s brainwashers have is that the brains being washed are far smaller and most of them come pre-washed, having already learned to fiercely believe more impossible things than even the Red Queen could manage.
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