Lie To Us

From Fafblog, the best political reporting in America:

After years of losing the the battle for hearts and minds to the Islamist menace, leaders in the Pentagon are finally planning to fight back with a plan sure to win the trust and confidence of the Arab street: a massive propaganda campaign.

The notion of seeding foreign nations - enemy, neutral and allied alike - with misleading information and outright lies may appear unseemly, immoral, and unwise, especially given the possibility that such false information will be picked up by credulous American news outlets to misinform the domestic populace. But one must consider the vast forces arrayed against the United States: in Iraq alone, America faces electricity, oil, food, and medical shortages, overstretched and overworn troops, a population incensed at ongoing and systematic torture and abuse at the hands of American occupiers, an escalating insurgency energized rather than deflated by recent counterstrikes, and the inescapable tug of civil war. With the facts solidly turned against the war effort, the war effort's last option is to officially declare war on the facts.

Facts - and the transmission of facts - have consistently proven to be a deadly opponent in the global war on terror. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, it was photographic proof - indisputable, hard evidence - that outraged the Arab world and forced a stunned America to ask the question, "Why did they take those photos?" When a missile crashes into a marketplace in Baghdad, or a child picks up a cluster bomb, it is television cameras - often from the despicable al-Jazeera network - that record the aftermath. And it was evidence of weapons of mass destruction - more hard facts - that failed to show up when most desperately needed, that deserted the proud coalition as quickly and as fiercely as Jacques Chirac.

The solution is obvious: if facts will not join the fight in the war on terror, then America must supply its own facts. If reality will not aid the United States, then lies will. New, friendly, manufactured news will counteract old, natural news of brutal slaughter and human rights abuses, overtake them with superior counterfactual force, and terminate them with extreme prejudice to win the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere.

A lesser nation would consider changing its more hideous policies to win over the rest of the world, but the Pentagon realizes that the better response is to simply lie to it. The Bush Administration has successfully used this policy on America for the last four years, and the country, the Medium Lobster is told, is safer than ever.