The Victory Banner

Adam McKay:

For the past five years the Republicans have come up with a great and subtle way to underline the theme of a speech for the casual viewer. They put it in bold letters on the flat or banner behind the speaker. It’s a trick that’s been pointed out many times, yet Bush and his ilk continue to ride it for all it’s worth.

Which is apparently quite a bit.

The most recent example is Bush's speech at the Naval Academy in Annapolis to reenergize America on the Iraq war. Despite the fact that the speech contained an almost aggressive lack of any new ideas, every AP wire picture of the President had the word "VICTORY" behind him. I told you. It's very subtle:

Ah Yes. The banner. We've seen it all before. Keep in mind, of course, that the President gave no reasonable "plan" for "victory" in Iraq, but there will be some who think he did, simply because they saw the banner. That word seeps into the collective thought of the debate. It is nothing more than shrewd marketing- but it is certainly not a shrewd political plan for this war.

But do we believe it? Not really. Most people in the US don't believe he has any plan. Nor should they, because the President can't stop misleading. The slow-turned public has only this past year has realized what a bad idea [rotton from the very core of the idea] this has been, and how they've been manipulated through the entire process with sleight-of-hand marketing plots such as the above.

Let's be clear: there's things that are real about this war, and there's things that are not. Unfortunately- the real things are horrifying. The frightening fact of torture, the CIA's secret pirsons and the flights related to torture which currently are rocking Europe. The persistent truth of a more unstable middle east than we could have predicted [or, perhaps, had we thought about it, we could have...].

But there's things about this war that are untrue- the way we were pushed into it, the intelligence that was used on us to accomplish that task, the political games played. Rolling Stone has a great story on John Rendon, a man who has crafted marketing psychology in most wars since Vietnam. And the Military is just now facing up to the fact that most of the positive stories in Iraq are, corroborating with information divulged in the John Rendon piece, placed and paid for by the US military.

This war may well be the first war of marketing, where the weapon has been to blanket all knowledge with confusion and fabrication. Aik.