Sound bites, photo ops, ?God?
Commentary by Pat Murphy
By PAT MURPHY
Pat Murphy
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Sunday?s New York Times featured a chilling 5,800-word investigative report about how a handful of White House and Pentagon lawyers secretly met and rewrote military law to accommodate vigilante views of how to treat terrorists.
Congress wasn?t informed. Federal courts were bypassed. President Bush was scarcely briefed. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell were kept in the dark, as were senior military officers of the Defense department.
No surprise: as with other efforts to conceal White House doings, this was Vice President Dick Cheney?s scheme. ?We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve,? he explained with proper spite, according to documents obtained by the Times.
Will many Americans know or care of this attempt by another Cheney cabal to work around the Constitution as well as Geneva Conventions, or, to know that not one of nearly 600 detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been prosecuted for ?terrorism??
Not unless the Times story can be reduced to a 30-second TV sound bite that voters can digest before moving on to the latest lurid twists in the phone sex legal contretemps involving Bill O?Reilly, Fox News? conservative poseur of values and virtue finally unmasked as a salacious lecher, and his ex-producer, Andrea Mackris.
Easily comprehended sound bites, catchy photo ops and religious fealty, rather than understanding weightier problems and more complex challenges facing the nation, will heavily influence the presidential outcome.
George Bush and John Kerry photo-op their manliness--the ?Mission Accomplished? landing by the president on an aircraft carrier in a jet, Kerry hunting geese, wind surfing and playing hockey while reminding voters of his Vietnam combat duty.
They take pains to claim deep religious faith, as if God is a Republican or Democrat willing to help dig us out of deepening debt, winning a war gone awry, restoring lost jobs.
One candidate creates the fearful possibility of more homeland terrorism if his opponent wins. The other promises safety from attack.
A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks finds voters adopt beliefs, many error-filled, because candidates make claims in sound bites that sound like fact.
This is the state of political discourse today, brokered by the tireless agent of mediocrity, television, where political spin becomes fact, where candidates? facial expressions on camera, height of lecterns and lighting could change the party in power.
One is tempted to see parallels between the American reliance on sound bites and photo ops in politics and methods among illiterate Third World tribes, whose village ballots contain animal pictures symbolizing political parties requiring no undue thought.
