Selling War

I was reading this piece in Dan Froomkin's column last week about the President's tanking approval numbers. It seems that the White House has become concerned with the polling data showing American's concern with the way the war in Iraq is going. The President is planning to address the topic in a series of speeches over the summer. What he can possibly say to muster up support for the disaster is a job for the most skilled of Washington's spin wizards, and I am skeptical that even the most talented among them can pull this off. This is good news for Americans who are worried about the Administration's domestic agenda, the President will now have less time to plug his Social Security plan.

One thing is true, you can never count these guys out. They have less support among regular Americans, but they have money up the wazoo, and money talks. They also have a mainstream media eager to suck up. They can probably get ABC and CNN to do a series of positive stories about a couple of Iraqis who have started up new a new taxi business or something.
The part that ABC will not mention is that a few of them have already been blown up from sitting in rush hour traffic in Baghdad.

Here is the first thing I have been able to find from the new White House sales pitch, this is from the President's weekly radio address:
"We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens"

Hey! Didn't the President get the memo? The one from the 9-11 commission? I thought the memo said we were attacked by Saudis. The President is right about people wanting to hurt our country. I can bet that some of them are now Iraqis who are not happy that we've truned their country into a big killing field.

I don't think the President intends to tell Americans what it's really like in Iraq, cause the picture just ain't pretty enough for prime time. By the way, if you want to get a glimpse of what regular Iraqis think about this shiny happy chance at freedom, check out Baghdad Burning,the things described there will sound just a little bit different from the stories American journalists confined to the Green Zone are putting out. I'm thinking that this new round of spin on the war will be recycled from the previous things that the Administration has said, I'm betting next weeks beer money that the new propaganda will not include an Exit Strategy, which is what we really should be talking about.

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