BUSHCO's Specialty: "Creating Imaginative Lies & Saturating The Media With Them" (Naomi Wolf)

[kpete]

My Favorite Mistake: Naomi Wolf On Why She Regrets Her Role In Gore's Campaign
Seema Kalia

Naomi Wolf: Professionally, my biggest mistake was in 2000. I worked for Al Gore's presidential campaign and took money to do it. That is a big mistake for any writer because you can't then say whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it. That was the great luxury of being a freelance writer and beholden to nobody--which I had been, up until then.

Writers have to be free to criticize anybody and criticize the powers that be and to always be transparent with their readers. So since I was formally signed up with the campaign rather than volunteering as I had in '96 I wasn't in a position, contractually, to hit back against the evil Republican National Committee when they started to circulate pernicious things about what I was doing on the campaign. The whole "Alpha Male" flap, the whole "earth tone" (wardrobe) flap was completely invented out of whole cloth - the stuff of urban legends, but they were such good urban legends they quickly got picked up by the mainstream media because no one was fact-checking it, and my hands were tied.

On the Republican side they've learned - and this is Karen Hughes' genius, and I think Karl Rove had a hand in this (and I don't think he's gone), they've learned thatAmericans now really get their information from dramatic media and from comedy shows and from Oprah so they're competing on that stage.

So it was very frustrating, when I'm used to being able to speak up, to not have a voice when the Bush Team was doing such a brilliant job of what we have subsequently learned is their specialty: creating imaginative lies and saturating the media with them.


more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seema-kalia/my-favorite-mistake-naom_b_77687.html

[Missy Vixen]

1. kpete, thank you for your consistent excellence every day!

I hope that you and your loved ones are having the happiest of holidays.

In the meantime, I received Ms. Wolf's book under the tree yesterday, and look forward to reading it.

Julie