Glenn Greenwald has yet another excellent post that I have to share with anyone who hasn’t read it. Here he focuses on the views of Cass Sunstein, Obama’s top official in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is tasked with — according to its website — “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs” among other things.
Greenwald begins by noting a paper Sunstein co-wrote in 2008 detailing how government should “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate‘ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government.”
Sunstein’s strategy of using propaganda reflects long-standing liberal ideas in American political culture. In the early- to mid-20th century, liberal theorists like Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann praised the use of propaganda as a means of controlling public opinion, and Sunstein is simply carrying on this tradition.
But Greenwald is most forceful in pointing to the hypocrisy of liberals who are now defending the Obama Administration for committing the very same acts they were so outraged about when done under Bush — particularly the paying of conservatives Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to promote Bush Administration programs as implicit “independent” experts. But now Obama’s Administration has been outed doing the same with Jonathan Gruber’s advocacy of the health care reform proposals.
Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case. Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.” What is one key difference? Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”
I recommend reading the Greenwald article in its entirety. Don’t miss it:
