John Rendon – the Goebbels of our era
My friend John Gehner just told me about this watershed piece of investigative reporting by James Bamford, an article from Rolling Stone that won the 2006 National Magazine Award in the “Best Reporting” category: The Man Who Sold the War. It is about John Rendon, who heads the “perception management” firm that was hired by the White House to “create the conditions for the removal of [Saddam] Hussein from power.”
This is amazing. We now know exactly who is responsible, who was hired for the job of manipulating the public to sell the War in Iraq that has destabilized the Middle East, brought our own country into unprecedented debt, cost us a tremendous amount of prestige as a country, and taken the lives of disadvantaged Americans and innocent Iraqis. It is no longer a matter of accusing the White House of being Macchiavellian and manipulating the public; we now know that they in fact hired a firm of specialists, the Rendon Group, to manipulate public perceptions in order to sell the War.
What an unpardonable, deliberate, direct distortion of democracy.
3 comments on “John Rendon – the Goebbels of our era”
Sounds like a plot for a movie. Wait, it was already done in “Wag the Dog.”
Bill, I can’t tell if you’re sounding a note of skepticism or simply noting that the story relates to something already understood in our culture?
Rory, he’s expressing either an outmoded existentialist despair, or pricking himself and finding something approaching hyperreality instead of blood.
What a great blog – have added it to my Pageflakes front page.
Hurrah for Rolling Stone. I will go find that, and thanks for the link.
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