Centerfield

Cool. Centrist propaganda qualifies as high praise, IMO. Right up there with wanker's wanker..

I think I'm going to keep spreading that good ole' propaganda that the true believers of the wings are biased and unwilling to practice strong-sense critical thinking.

Propaganda from Richard Paul, courtesy this site:

Paul (1987) distinguishes between "weak sense" and "strong sense" critical thinking in the following way. People who have the abilities necessary for undertaking quality critical and creative thought but use them only to their own advantage are critical and creative thinkers in the weak sense. Strong sense critical and creative thinkers, however, are committed to using their abilities to seek out the most accurate and fair positions regardless of or in spite of their own particular interests or desires. Such thinking takes into account the needs, viewpoints and arguments of others and is built upon analysis of one's own motives.

Centrist propaganda = not mindlessly supporting the wingers. Cool! High praise indeed.

It would be good if there was a human rights org that had some objective definition of genocide -- so that pretty much all could understand if Darfur is an ongoing genocide (action by UN req'd) or is not (action not req'd).

It would be good to have a prison conditions org that look at most prisons in the world for levels of treatment, and rate them -- I'm pretty sure Gitmo would be rated highly.

Tracking media bias by front page articles and level of slant would be good, too.

It could be propaganda if centrists propagated an argument that absolved the Bush Administration from blame for lying about WMD in order to further the idea that both sides are essentially fair-minded. That's what the liberals object to--they think Republicans (at least Bush/conservatives)are scum and should be exposed as such. Thus, from their POV, an argument that the fault lay in the intelligence community would be a form of propaganda. Of course, the left and right both think that anyone that disagrees with it are in cahoots with the "enemy."

However, I'm not sure the reviewer's conclusion is so off-base. I haven't read the book, so I clearly can't comment on the substance. But I have to say that, based on what I have read, while I don't think there were a bunch of people sitting around in a room plotting how to divide up the Iraqi oil, I do think that the administration had made a decision to go to war regardless of what the intelligence showed. The CIA had repeatedly tried to condition its conclusions but the administration (or George Tenet at least) insisted on a more clear-cut conclusion that Saddam did have WMD. So, my belief is that, the decision to go to war based on WMD was more than just an "innocent" mistake. The administration knew or should have known that there were questions about the WMD.

A neophyte like myself or George W. Bush might be over-impressed by the apparent solidity of intelligence estimates printed in a briefing paper. Old hands like Cheney or Rumsfeld should have known better.

The problem with questionable intelligence is not that it might be wrong. It's that it might be right. If you fail to act on it because it's not 100% cast-in-concrete verified, it can bite you in the ass. As did 9/11--the anti-Bush crowd has made a massive deal of the administration's failure to act immediately and overwhelmingly on vague and scant and questionable intel in advance of 9/11, and has made a massive deal of the administration NOT failing to react to apparently much more solid and much more widely shared and supported (though still iffy) intel in going to war.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.

the anti-Bush crowd has made a massive deal of the administration's failure to act immediately and overwhelmingly on vague and scant and questionable intel in advance of 9/11

It's not the failure to act so much as the failure to investigate. For comparison, look at Clinton's reaction to the intelligence buzz in late 1999. He called agency head meetings every day which created the chance to get lucky and get the clue that enabled the border patrol to foil the millenium bombing plot. In contrast, Bush received 36 PDBs prior to 9/11 about terror related threats--a situation which the 9/11 Commission described as the system blinking red--yet refused Richard Clarke's pleas to have similar meetings until late August.

Even with all that, the "Jersey girls" did not go all out to oppose Bush until Bush obstructed the 9/11 investigation in every way he could.

Here's a simple propaganda plan for folks like us:

1. Call everyone who disagrees with us an "extremist", so ours is de-facto the only reasonable position.
2. Portray all of our views as if they were the views of middle America. If anyone disagrees, they are opposing the wisdom of everyday Americans.
3. Argue that the media and the punditocracy are all either liberals or conservatives who can only ignore or criticize our views.

Point #3 is very important, guys. We must be the victim of media elites like every other self-respecting political movement.

It could work guys. Come on!

I don't blame Bush for 9/11. I think Tully is right--the pre 9/11 intelligence was vague and it's unfair to selectively choose facts that make the attack seem more obvious than it was. On the other hand, given the consequences and the obvious time crunch, it would have made more sense to act on vague intelligence with respect to 9/11 than it did to rush into Iraq. There was no reason Bush had to invade Iraq at the time he did based on questionable intelligence IF WMD was actually the reason.

Propaganda William? No way. That stuff is all true. Nobody makes koolaid like you. Does it come with a free tinfoil hat? Yay!

I do think that not that long ago someone on this site mentioned the idea of establishing a centrist minded academic journal, much like the neo-conservatives had in the 1960's.

This could lend intellectual credibility to what may just be disregarded as "centrist propoganda."

Where did that idea go?