After I finished watching the movie ‘Wag the Dog’ I realized how thin and blurred is the line between politics, media and show business.
Many years after that I kept asking myself how many of the political events are master minded by the USA, UK and other big players and how many are genuine movements, and with every passing year I am losing more and more of my enthusiasm and belief in the innate good of people.
In ‘Wag the Dog’ the spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) is called to the White House to disarm a sex scandal ready to erupt, scandal that will jeopardize the President’s bid for a second term. Conrad Brean knows how to manipulate politics, the press and most importantly, the American people.
Anticipating the reaction of the press, Brean creates a bigger story, something to deflect the attention from the president to something else. And that something else is a fake war with Albania.
Helped by Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a famed Hollywood producer, Brean assembles a crisis team that will orchestrate a global conflict.
Less than a month after the movie was released, President Bill Clinton was embroiled in a sex scandal arising from his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Over the course of 1998 and early 1999, as the scandal dominated American politics, the US engaged in three military operations:
• Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing campaign in Iraq that took place as the U.S. House of Representatives debated articles of impeachment against Clinton
• Operation Infinite Reach, a pair of missile strikes against suspected terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan three days after Clinton admitted in a nationally televised address that he had an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky
• Operation Allied Force, a 78-day-long NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that began weeks after Clinton was acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial.
In a further coincidence, the missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan were announced by the White House moments before the beginning of a press conference in which Lewinsky was to give details of her appearance before Congress.
Critics, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, charged that the former operation was an attempt to distract attention from the Lewinsky scandal, and Serb state television went so far as to broadcast Wag The Dog in the midst of NATO attacks on Serbia.
Source: wikipedia
‘Canadian Bacon’, released in 1995, is another movie dealing with the same issue: start a war to divert the attention from the stringent domestic issues. In the movie, the problem with this plan is that, with the demise of the Soviet Union, there’s no one left to go to war with. But some brainstorming leads to an attempt to start a cold war with Canada (“everyone hates Canadians”), using media manipulation as the main tool to stoke the passions of the US public.
Going back to the previous article on Obama, Clinton and NAFTA, it looks like the reality imitates art, much more than vice versa. When having domestic trouble try to blame everybody around, but the true culprits.
I have to admit that when I found out that the USA was among the first nations to approve/accept/recognize Kosovo independence, one though revolved around the question ‘cui bono’? (to whose benefits) and I was looking for a political reason related to the current presidential nomination campaign, rather than a financial one.
Speaking of the political campaign, not that it matters to anybody but me, I have to say that I don’t like any of the candidates, regardless the political orientation.
I don’t particularly like Hilary Clinton. I had mixed feelings until she launched the rhetoric on how NAFTA should be redesigned, implying that basically Canada and Mexico suck the USA vitality.
Give me a freaking break!
I lost any consideration I might have had for her.