Bill at Castle Argghhh! takes on a Big Lie.
Money quote(s):
"(O)ne of the most effective techniques the losers use in their all-consuming scramble to displace the current winners (or to retain their power as current winners -- but regardless of whether they're the Outs or the Ins, they're still losers) is the Big Lie."
Be sure to read the part where he explains where Cloward and Piven sourced this technique.
"There’s been one particular Big Lie going around that’s now so entrenched that even people who know better are accepting it as truth, and I got so tired of correcting individuals who spouted it that I promised myself I’d go full auto the next time I heard it.
Yesterday, I heard it – “We went to war in Iraq for a lie, because there were no WMD.”
Now, let’s start with the basics. WMD is an acronym for the old Soviet term for nukes (“Weapons of Mass Destruction”), which they distinguished from chem and bio agents (“Weapons of Mass Casualties”), while we lumped everything together, first under the acronym CBR (“Chemical, Biological, Radiological”) and later under NBC (“Nuclear, Biological, Chemical”). Somehow, probably because the boffins in the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace thought it was cool to use Sov terms for everything, WMD replaced NBC in MilSpeak, and the civilians in 1600 Pennsy thought it was cool to sprinkle their public pronouncements with MilSpeak terms (thus accruing Warrior Status Points without the onus of actually having to do, like, Warrior Stuff), WMD morphed into meaning *all* classes of unconventional weaponry, not merely nukes. The Russians are still pretty amused at that, by the way.
So, because Saddam had chemical weaponry and had a history of using them on his enemies, and because he let it be known that his bug guys were working on weaponizing germs of varying nastiness, and because he had a known on-again, off-again nuclear program, politicians who wanted to be in with the cool kids began referring to “Saddam’s WMD.” And they referred to them a lot – all through the ‘90s (and as late as 2003), every Democrat who got face time with a microphone talked about Saddam’s WMD and how unacceptable the situation was.
After the novelty of having waxed a modern army (albeit one with a thoroughly incompetent C-in-C) in a few days wore off, the Dems suddenly realized that George W. Bush had attained rock star status in the eyes of the voters. They panicked, and seized on the fact that Saddam hadn’t hit us with anything unconventional as the genesis of a new talking point for the 2004 election campaign.
“Where are the WMDs?”
They demanded that the troops stop whatever they happened to be doing and scour Iraq until they found Saddam’s stash."
To be fair, although WMD were connected with some of the Iraq War Resolution's 23 writs, they were the ones you heard the most about during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And not just the media, actual Administration spokesmen and high officials kept beating this drum.
"To be continued…]"
