But there's a deeper meaning to this story. Like no administration before it, the Bush administration has mastered what the media critic Walter Lippmann called "the manufacture of consent" -- the use of "psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication," to muster mass support for elite agendas. Staging photo-ops whose choreographed drama and camera-ready visuals ("Mission Accomplished") are intended to play to the emotions and overrule objections; reducing complicated geopolitical issues to black-or-white dualisms (Team America: World Police versus the Axis of Evil!); stonewalling the media, cherry-picking intelligence and parroting Karl Rove-approved talking points -- the Bush administration represents the apotheosis of government by spin control.
McClellan's 'Matrix' moment
Among the many egregious examples of this were the administration's willingness to pay $240,000 to a prominent conservative columnist to promote the No Child Left Behind program, and the Pentagon's secret, multimillion-dollar program to plant paid propaganda in Iraqi newspapers.
Sure, sure, truth is the first casualty of war, and politics is just war with a smile and a starched collar. But the burgeoning genre of Bush administration tell-alls, of which McClellan's is only the latest, paints a portrait of a White House utterly unconcerned with facts yet fervently attentive to public opinion polls. It is a White House whose solution to every unhappy turn of events -- the Iraqi insurgency, Hurricane Katrina, a moribund economy -- is to treat it not as a real-world problem requiring a real-world solution but as a glitch in the Matrix, "a perception problem" to be handled with the Message of the Day and the Theme of the Week.
The deeper story here is the shift from the Enlightenment worldview, whose commitment to reasoned debate and empirical truth used to be the cornerstone of our little experiment in democracy, to the faith-based worldview of fundamentalism -- not just the fundamentalism of the religious right but fundamentalisms of every sort. The Iraq war came about, in large part, through a harmonic convergence of personal passions, political agendas and ideological crusades, all faith-based rather than fact-driven. Bush, McClellan tells us, is a man who "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment" and who "to this day ... seems unbothered by the disconnect between the chief rationale for war and the driving motivation behind it, and unconcerned about how the case was packaged."
