Views > March 24, 2006

Strangers to the Truth

By Joel Bleifuss

Go to the Progress for America's Information Center and download the group's newest brochure, which features this disinformation.

Coming soon to a media market near you:

The GOP (Grand Old Prevaricators), who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, have been test-marketing another TV ad campaign.

The fabrication this time: the war in Iraq. The target: any Democratic candidate who speaks out against the U.S. mission during the mid-term elections. The venue for the test is Minnesota.

Two ads have run so far. Both have caused a furor.

The first ad featured footage of the World Trade Center burning and testimony from soldiers who have fought in Iraq. Lt. Col. Robert Stephenson of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, tells viewers: “You’d never know it from news reports but our enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda, the same terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11.” And Capt. Mark Weber of the U.S. Army Reserve ominously asks: “Where do you want to fight terrorists? [pause] We want to fight them and destroy them in Iraq.”

The second featured heartfelt testimonials from parents who share the screen with giant sepia-toned images of their sons who died in Iraq. That ad says in part:

Voiceover: “September 11, 2001, the battle began on the streets of America.”

Patrick Kelly, who lost his son Bryan: “These people are out to destroy us.”

Chuck Larson, U.S. Army Reserves: “If we were not fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, I am convinced we would be fighting them in America and all we have to do is look back at September 11.”

Merrilee Carlson, who lost her son Michael: “And thank God there are people like Michael who would put their lives on the line for the rest of our country and our world.”

Both ads conclude with this slogan, “Iraq: The front line in the war on terror.”

After the first ad, Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) Party Chairman Brian Melendez told WCCO, the CBS affiliate, “There is room for a lot of puffery in politics, there is room for spin, there is room for opinion, there is room for disagreement, there shouldn’t be room for lies and this ad is about lies.”

WCCO reporter Pat Kessler was more restrained. Characterizing the ads as “very misleading,” he informed viewers that the 9/11 Commission had found no evidence of any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. (WCCO ran the ads, but KSTP, the ABC affiliate, refused to do so.)

But Bev Anderson perhaps put it best. She wrote to WCCO and, as the station reported, said the ads were similar to “a tactic Hitler used … repeat a lie often enough and people come to believe it as fact.”

Though WCCO did not note the fact, she was quoting Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who said:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Bush himself said much the same thing, though less eloquently, on May 24, 2005, in Rochester, N.Y., when out on the road trying to sell his Social Security scam. He told the crowd gathered at the Athena Performing Arts Center:

See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

But will this shit fly in Minnesota?

TV viewer Liz Carlson doubted whether the ads would be effective. She wrote WCCO and said, “Minnesotans can recognize bullshit even if they wrap it in an American flag.”

But why Minnesota? Republicans have their eyes on the U.S. Senate seat, currently held by Democratic Sen. Mark Dayton, who is stepping down. It’s the best chance they have to pick up a seat in the mid-term elections. The goal of the ad campaign is to inoculate the GOP’s chosen candidate, Rep. Mark Kennedy, against any anti-war sentiments voiced by his likely opponent, Hennipen County Attorney Amy Klobuchar, a progressive Minneapolis Democrat who has the credentials of a law-and-order prosecutor. Currently, Klobuchar holds a slight lead in the polls.

This ad campaign, which so far has cost $1 million in Minnesota alone, was made and paid for by Progress for America Voter Fund, a 527 group, which spent $36 million in 2004 to help elect Bush.

Progress for America (PFA), the parent of Progress for America Voter Fund, was founded in 2001 by Tony Feather, the political director of the 2000 Bush-Cheney Campaign. Feather has been described by the Washington Post as “a close ally of Karl Rove.” In 2003, he left PFA to join DCI Group, a public relations firm whose principals were involved with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

These days, the PFA home page is devoted to promoting “Iraq: The Front Line in the War on Terror.” You can go there to see the ads, which, thanks to a “saturation buy,” average Minnesota television viewers saw 22 times from Feb. 9 to 22, PFA spokesman Stuart Roy told the Chicago Tribune.

PFA is masterful at coming up with commercials that stoke the fires of right-wing populism. In 2004, one PFA ad featured Osama bin Laden and other terrorists whose photos were accompanied by the voiceover: “These people want to kill us. … Would you trust Kerry against these fanatic killers? President Bush didn’t start this war, but he will finish it.”

Some have credited another PFA ad, which ran 30,000 times in nine swing states, with swinging the 2004 election to Bush. “Ashley’s Story” featured a photograph of Bush at a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio, hugging 16-year-old Ashley Faulkner, whose mother was killed on 9/11. In the ad, Ashley told viewers, “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe, that I’m okay.”

The B team

On the other side of the aisle are the shining lights of the Democratic Party, James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Bob Shrum (the consultant who ran Kerry’s campaign and shied away from confronting the Swift Boat Veterans). These three men founded the Democracy Corps, a nonprofit “dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people.” Recall that on Oct. 3, 2002, prior to the Iraq war resolution votes, Democracy Corps advised Capitol Hill Democrats: “This decision [to support or oppose an Iraq war resolution] will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).” In other words, Carville and friends advised Democrats to cater to public opinion and let Bush have his war.

That same year, Carville and his associates at GCS (Greenberg Carville Shrum) were working in Bolivia, as the hired guns for presidential candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Their involvement in the 2002 Bolivian election is the subject of a new documentary, Our Brand is Crisis, directed by Rachel Boynton. In the film, Jeremy Rosner, the campaign’s pollster and chief strategist, explains their mission: “We are in this because we not only believe in democracy, but in a particular brand of democracy, which is progressive, social democratic, market-based and modern.” And Tad Devine, who is in charge of advertising, tells Sanchez de Lozada, “We must own crisis and we must brand crisis.” In other words, GCS was planning to use Bolivia’s economic crisis to the campaign’s advantage.

Sanchez de Lozada won the June 2002 election, defeating Manfred Reyes Villa, a former military strongman, and Evo Morales, Bolivia’s current president. It wasn’t meant to last though. Sanchez de Lozada was overthrown the next year by a popular uprising.

Questionable character

In Arizona, the attorney general’s office is investigating state treasurer David Petersen for “theft, fraudulent schemes and practices, and conflict of interest,” reports Phil Riske in the Arizona Capitol Times.

Petersen was featured in Silja J.A. Talvi’s January cover story “Cult of Character.” She reported how Petersen, standing at the podium of the “Building Cities of Character” conference, bragged about how his state’s Family Services Committee passed “Character Education legislation.”

“All schools now have it implemented,” he said. “We’re fighting for the soul of this nation.”

Now Petersen is fighting in court. According to Character First!, which sponsored the conference, Petersen was paid $4,000 in commissions for selling Character First materials to Arizona public schools. It is also alleged that he billed the state for travel costs associated with Character First! His former secretary, Wanda Simeona, in a December 2005 letter of resignation, charged, “You go all over the state teaching about Character and charge the state mileage.”

Petersen has since announced he will not seek re-election. He is now waiting to see if criminal charges will be filed.

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• Reader Comments

  when you put goebels and bush together it is sadly striking how stupid we have become. goebels was smart and eloquent: bush is a vacant sign. what has happened to us. we kill for the likes of evolutionary nulls like bush. we deserve everything that is coming to us. we are really too stupid to be alive. if we didn’t have the elite terrorists killing to protect our wretched freedom, we would already be dead, but we are as good as dead already.

  Posted by dougshaeffer on Mar 26, 2006 at 8:40 AM

  What we need to do is wake up out of our Post 9/11 Stress Disorder, which makes us look to a protector figure for safety and mutes our collective rational faculties.

  Ah, rational faculties! If only they were considered as admirable as having augmented tits or a fat bank account!

  If throwing down with al Qaeda had been the primary agenda, that fight was in Afghanistan. Whatever other justifications might be cited in regards to the Iraq War, beating up on al Qaeda isn’t one of them.

  And dougshaeffer, in response to your question, “what has happened to us”, the answer in part is that for years Americans have emphasized 1) entertainment rather than knowledge, 2) coddling of adolescent feelings rather than the training of incisive minds in schools, and 3) the convenience of sound-bite journalism, rather than insisting upon informative reporting that includes critical analysis of the world’s complexities in an honest and “uncooked” manner. In that context, is anything that we’re seeing, with the easy and liberal use of misinformation, really that surprising? Seems like the market for such is large and growing, more’s the pity.

  Posted by Kuya on Mar 28, 2006 at 1:37 AM

  kuya, i agree with your assessment. my question “what has happened to us” i guess is rhetorical. like waking up to the fact that our lives are constructed and mostly not by us, yet we are still somehow us and must stay awake.
  re al queda afghanistan, we had to get the opium flowing again. our first priority was to free the drug trade from taliban control at least as i understand it wall street was jonesing bad.

  Posted by dougshaeffer on Mar 28, 2006 at 9:51 AM

  Goebbels is quoted:

  “It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

  What’s missing from this rather selective piece of journalism is the fact that the folks upset about this ad are themselves following Goebells’ advice in the area of repressing dissent, exactly as did the Kerry campaign in its efforts to silence the Swiftvets and others who simply wished to exercise their supposed rights of free speech in attempting to convey their own recollections of John Kerry’s “heroism” in Vietnam.

  E-mail message from the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, demonstrating its “powers to repress dissent”:

  Dear DFLer,

  I’ve heard from many of you that you are disturbed by the misleading “Midwest Heroes” ads produced by Progress for America Voter Fund that are currently being run by KARE 11 and WCCO. The ads erroneously make a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists attacks and suggest that the war in Iraq will prevent an attack by Al Queda in America. The 9/11 Commission findings clearly state that there was no connection between Iraq and the the Al Queda terrorists attacks on 9/11. We must call for media responsibility regarding this issue. We have extraordinary sympathy for our troops and their families and believe that while our soldiers’ role is to protect the citizens of our country, it is our role as citizens to protect our soldiers and to make certain that they are not misused. It is a travesty that the tragedies of five countries and the deaths of our brave men and women are being used in this type of propaganda.

  Right now, our state is a testing ground for these ads. If Minnesota speaks out and says no to this ad, the entire country can thank us. What we do here, now, will have an enormous impact on the success or failure of this kind of swiftboating in 06.

  You can view the ads at: http://www.midwestheroes.com/

  Additionally, WCCO did a Reality Check stating that the ad is misleading and partly true, which in my mind means that it is partly false. See it at: http://www.wcco.com/video/?id=14609@wcco.dayport.com

  If you feel that this ad is doing a disservice to our troops and is misleading at best, and pure propaganda at worst, please call:

  KARE 11 at 763 546 1111

  WCCO at 612 370 0611

  to ask for the removal of the ads. Letters to the Editor in your local paper would be helpful to point out the untruths being communicated to citizens as fact. Thanks in advance for being a voice of truth, and for all that you do to improve the state of our nation and state.

  DFL Chair Brian Melendez will be holding a press conference at the State Capitol today at 2:30 to ask that this ad be pulled from the air waves. He will be joined by congressional candidate and veteran Tim Walz. Please tune in to your evening news to see coverage of this important event.

  Sincerely,

  Donna
  Donna Cassutt, Associate Chair,
  Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party

  Criticizing the ad’s content is fine.  However, calling for their removal appears to me to be an admission that they are unable to do so effectively. 

  What’s that little reference to freedom of speech again?  Constitution or some such?

  Posted by Natalie on Mar 29, 2006 at 2:42 AM

  Per Natalie’s post below, one of the reason’s Kerry lost in 2004 was that he DID NOT effectively challenge the lies and distortions coming from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.  (Hah! that’s a good one!  “Truth”!!!)

  Perhaps poor Natalie’s been living on Mars, or in Mississippi, for that matter, for it’s hard to see how she - or anyone else in America - could have missed how Karl Rove and his happy band of lying thugs have been playing right out of Goebbel’s playbook.  George Dumbya’s administration takes unbridled glee in squashing dissent, limiting all Q&A;opportunities to pre-screened Stepford Citizens and mislabelling anyone who disagrees with them as “traitors.” The fact that she’s at least reading “In These Times” speaks better for her than most of the Shiite Right who rely on the likes of Rush Limbore and his ilk for news, but like most of them, she misses the point entirely:  television stations have no obligation to air BULLSHIT, and that’s exactly what these ads are.

  Posted by davetimp on Mar 29, 2006 at 4:36 PM

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