Tag Archives: Debt Ceiling Crisis

Everybody remembers Wag the Dog, right?  1997, Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman.  A fictional president gets caught touching up a very underage girl and his public relations team swings into action to create a fake war and divert the public’s attention until after the election.  In the book,

Kirsten Dunst as a Fleeing Albanian

the President was Bush 41 and it was all about the war in Iraq, but films take liberties.  Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a bad thing.

Anyway, pretty much nobody denies that the press is used to distract the public from certain issues that powerful people might find embarrassing.  I wrote a couple of days ago about how the Huffington Post, for no apparent reason, removed the words “we’re going to hurt some people” from a story about a group of Republicans talking about the debt ceiling debate.  If those words were involved in the debate, it could be bad for Republicans.  Another example is from 2004, how the New York Times knew about the warrantless wiretapping in October, but delayed the story until after November because (they actually said this) it might have “negatively impacted” the election.  That is, Kerry might have won.

I suspect something like that is going on with this Debt Ceiling Crisis.  Newspaper headlines have been about nothing else for the last two weeks, with a slight break when Amy Winehouse died because, whatever else is happening in the world, celebrities die and the news media loves it when they do.  The massacre in Norway was kind of hard to avoid, too.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had any detailed updates on what’s happening in Syria, Yemen or even Libya.  Haven’t heard much about Bradley Manning or Julian Assange for awhile, either.  Of course, there’s no change in the Bradley Manning case (still hasn’t had a trial) and Assange is also going through some legal maneuvers which can make for a dry news story, but still.  I don’t know that what they are trying to hide has to do with any of those stories, or whether there is some other big financial or sexual scandal they are trying to hide, but I strongly suspect they are hiding something.

It’s just too much ink on one issue for too long for it to be otherwise.