Working in a used bookstore has been a fascinating exposure to history, in the form of once-current publications meant to expose fraud and malfeasance. Every administration has had some of each in its record, to be sure; but what's struck me is the unchanging quantity of propaganda, meant to sway opinion, confound honest inquiries, and keep the voting public (or just enough of them) unaware of what's really been going on.
My example de jour: the infamous 'China Lobby' of the 1940s, lead by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and her chosen clique of followers in official (and social) wartime Washington. After the war with Japan was won, her husband the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek ought to have been well able to reform his country's politics and improve his impoverished people's sorry lot. Gods alone knew that we'd paid enough in foreign aid and military assistance to help him do so---somewhere over $30 billion, by then-President Harry Truman's reckoning.
Mao Tse-Tung's Communists, however, had a head start toward winning loyalties among rural Chinese; Chiang's forces ultimately found themselves driven from power, and their leaders fled offshore to Taiwan. In Washington, "Who Lost China?" became a war cry of political scalp-hunters...and the opening act of the witch-hunts which blighted American politics for the next decade and more.
Recently the same tactics and strategy were brought to bear on President Obama's administration, all over the insurgent attack which killed Ambassador Chris Stephens in Benghazi. The subsequent GOP investigations were (and are) rife with 'terminological inexactitudes'; a smallish monitoring outpost became a diplomatic facility, an opportunistic attack became a major security lapse, and fragmentary reports of a squalid skirmish became a battle monitored in real time from the White House Situation Room, with Barack Obama vacillating while Ambassador Stephens and his bodyguards were killed. In short, lies by strident opportunists---remarkably like the accusations made by Madame Chiang's supporters in 1949. I'm not the only one who gets this, but I'm among the only ones old enough to know how "Who Lost China?" has mutated into "Who Botched Benghazi?"
In fact, any deficiency in the security at our embassies and consulates across the Near and Middle East goes right back to Congressionally-mandated budget cuts. In trying to 'slap' then-Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton, conservatives undermined the State Department's ability to protect facilities and personnel---which, tragically, included Chris Stephens. He was the casualty we could least afford to suffer.
In fact, any deficiency in the security at our embassies and consulates across the Near and Middle East goes right back to Congressionally-mandated budget cuts. In trying to 'slap' then-Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton, conservatives undermined the State Department's ability to protect facilities and personnel---which, tragically, included Chris Stephens. He was the casualty we could least afford to suffer.
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