Elliot D. Cohen: McBrain Washed: How McCain/Palin Are Selling A Phony Image

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen

Americans are being duped by the McCain/Palin campaign. This campaign is adept at playing on human weaknesses in rationally processing ideas and is using well-designed devices of manipulation to change people's minds. This is why they are not discussing the issues. They believe that they are more likely to win votes through mind manipulation than through the appeal to reason. And it seems to be working. Americans need to beware or else they will vote into office another regime of guile and deception, perhaps one that is even more artful at it than the Bush Administration.

Many people were very impressed by Sarah Palin because the McCain campaign sold her as another "maverick." It built her image as someone who has engaged in ethics reform, stood up against big oil, did unconventional things such as sell a jet on E-Bay, opposed earmarks, and said "No thanks" to the "Bridge to Nowhere." It would have been quite another image had they told you that she was marred in corruption, supported big oil's lucrative interest in drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Preserve, never even sold the jet on E-Bay, requested millions in earmarks in both mayoral and gubernatorial capacities, and had originally been in favor of the "Bridge to Nowhere."

True, all these facts were singularly exposed by the media, but that has done little or nothing to dislodge the maverick image the campaign had already scripted for this candidate. Repeat something often enough, and people will begin to internalize the idea and will be disposed to dismiss any evidence that contradicts it. This is what sunk the Titanic. Everyone said the Titanic was unsinkable. So when the ship approached an iceberg, the skipper said full speed ahead. And why? Well, because the Titanic was unsinkable. Never mind the facts.

Is Sarah Palin a phony? Oh no! How could she be, she's a real maverick. The facts no longer count, for, like the Titanic, she too is unassailable. Such is the MO of the McCain/Palin campaign. The fact is, Palin is no maverick, but the McCain campaign doesn't care about facts. They care about image, and it is only an image and not reality that could possibly put her in the White House.

John McCain is no maverick either. He was a foot soldier for the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a militant organization that spearheaded the neocon movement in the United States, and largely defined the foreign affairs policies of the Bush Administration. He was a major supporter of Almed Chalabi, the Iraqi charlatan responsible for providing the false intelligence that took us to war in Iraq. McCain was instrumental in helping to wastefully funnel millions of American tax payers' dollars to Chalibi's Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi rebels who, from 1998 until shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, futilely attempted to instigate a national uprising against Saddam Hussein.

Far from living up to his image of being a champion of the rights of POW/MIAs, McCain sold out POW/MIA families by adding an amendment to the Missing Service Personnel Act of 1995, which eviscerated provisions of this law that made government more responsive to locating and providing the whereabouts of MIA/POWs.

And, far from living up to his image of "not winning any popularity contests," McCain also lacks principled conviction. This former Vietnam POW, who himself was tortured, has even recapitulated his rejection of torture, and has supported the Bush Administration's refusal to place off bounds cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees including waterboarding.

McCain is and always has been a servant of a far right, militant branch of the Republican Party that now dominates Washington under the Bush Administration. Obama was correct when he said that McCain's promise to bring change to Washington is like putting lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. And McCain is still no maverick.

This is what Americans would really be getting from a possible McCain/Palin administration. Unfortunately, this is not the image many Americans have. The ads that the McCain/Palin campaign run have been artfully created to manufacture reality according to what it wants Americans to believe, but not what is true. Here is a representative example:

This past August, the McCain campaign published a video ad on the Internet portraying Obama as "The One." The video mocked Obama with a scene from the movie "The Ten Commandments" in which the waters parted for Moses, played by Charlton Heston. At one point the ad stated "He can do no wrong" and then the video showed CBS news correspondent Lara Logan ask Obama, "Do you have any doubts?" and Obama answering "Never."

But here is what really transpired. The real question Logan asked was "Do you have any doubts about your foreign affairs experience?" The omission was designed to make it look like Obama did not have any doubts about anything whatsoever. It contrived reality to make him look arrogant.
 
In another part of this video, Obama stated, "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." But this too was lifted out of context. The real event transpired at a closed meeting with Congressional representatives during which, referring to his speech delivered in Berlin, Obama stated that the 200,000 people who came to his speech came not just for him. Again the "not just for him" part was omitted for the deliberate purpose of making him sound arrogant. Obama in fact never said he was "The One" but rather that "we are the ones we've been waiting for." Here is the complete passage:

"You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. It will not be resolved on even a Super Duper Tuesday. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have so little, who've been told that they cannot have what they dream, that they cannot be what they imagine. Yes, they can."

So Obama's real point was to emphasize that the people are the ones who must affect change. Yet, the ad said Obama "has anointed himself ready to carry the burden of The One." Not only was this false, but Obama's point was the exact opposite, namely the people, not he, must bear the burden.
 
Obama is not, from all evidence to date, an arrogant man. But reality was twisted to turn him into one for purposes of discrediting him. After all, who wants an arrogant know-it-all, who thinks he's Moses, in the White House?

But it gets even worse than this. The idea of painting a black man as arrogant helps to propagate an old stereotype of the "uppity" black person, a stereotype that is unfortunately still entertained in some Southern states. In fact, on September 4, House Representative Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) actually called Obama and his wife "uppity." "Just from what little I've seen of and Mr. Obama," he said, "they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity." For the McCain campaign, the manufacturing of reality to fit the basest of human inclinations, even racism, is not off-limits.

What made the Bush Administration so treacherous was its propensity to distort reality. Recall the Downing Street Memo, which reported that Bush wanted to "make the facts fit the policy" in order to sell the Iraq war to the American people. Sadly, this is exactly what the McCain/Palin campaign is all about: making the facts fit the image that it wants voters to buy. This bodes badly for the prognosis of what living under a McCain/Palin administration would be like. In all probability, much like the Bush Administration, it would lack candor and would do its best to manipulate and deceive the public into supporting its policies.
 
The American public cannot afford to allow itself to be deceived again. The nation is in a fragile state. It is on the verge of economic collapse. This is reality. Nevertheless, McCain insists that the U.S. economy is "fundamentally sound." That too is what George W. Bush has said. Reality is here, McCain (and Bush) there. We are also in a quagmire in Iraq that McCain helped to get us into. Never mind whether the surge worked or not; in fact, McCain in 2002, prior to the invasion of Iraq, served as co-chair, with Joseph Lieberman, of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), which worked cooperatively with the Bush Administration to build public support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And Randy Scheunemann, now McCain's chief defense and foreign policy advisor, was the executive director of the CLI as well as a co-director of PNAC.

As part of the PNAC credo, both McCain and Scheunemann support investing incredible amounts of money in waging and sustaining multiple, simultaneous wars overseas (including Iran). This would unavoidably be at the expense of neglecting pressing concerns at home, including the economy, healthcare, the environment, and education. Such is the historical and ideological baggage that comes with a McCain presidency no matter how the McCain/Palin campaign tries to spin it.

McCain says that government should stay out of the private lives of Americans. This is the mindset the McCain campaign wants Americans to buy, and he has repeatedly drummed it into them. Yet he has wholeheartedly embraced the Bush Administration's warrantless program of mass spying on the private phone and e-mail messages of millions of Americans. And Palin believes that a woman should be forced by government to bear a child even in cases of rape and incest. These facts are inconsistent with the image of a government that stays out of the private lives of Americans. Spying on Americans' private conversations and forcing a victim of rape and incest to have a baby (no matter what one's personal moral views on these subjects might be) is not a government that stays out of the private lives of citizens. These facts contradict this image and therefore invalidate it. But the McCain campaign does not care about reality, unless it is the reality that it self-servingly wants to manufacture.

Americans need to turn this vicious process of McBrain washing around before it's too late. In this unhappy condition, Americans need to demand that the real issues be addressed. They need to be sensitive to the attempt to deceive and manipulate their vote, and they need to insist on evidence and rational argument before believing what is claimed. The survival of the nation may be at stake. It is no less than a national emergency!

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a political analyst, columnist, and media critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is the first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

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