I just read a story in the New York Times, the Pentagon weighing the use of deception in a broad arena, that should have shocked me. But I wasn't even particularly angry about it. I just shook my head again, wondering how we have so lost our way.
There's obviously quite a few angles to this story, but the following quote caught my eye, distilling, I think, the primary moral failure of the Bush administration: their Straussian, morally relativistic approach to everything from Social Security to foreign policy, that allows them to justify anything to themselves because they 'know' that it is all for the greater good.
"In the battle of perception management, where the enemy is clearly using the media to help manage perceptions of the general public, our job is not perception management but to counter the enemy's perception management," said the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita.
So our job isn't to spread the word about all the good works we're doing, but to sucker as many people as we can in order to further our short term interests. How fucking sad.
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