Freedom's Watch

I've heard a couple radio commercials by an organization called Freedom's Watch (okay, okay, I listen to some right-wing radio... keep your enemies close, as they say). They're an organization dedicated to increasing public support for the war and the current regime. The spot was just dripping with the worst brand of propaganda, you know, the kind even the President has begun to tone down, using phrases like "Victory can and must be achieved!", and "Some people have forgotten the sacrifices our soldiers have made", and "Congress must make an important and historic choice: Surrender to terrorist in Iraq or help that government defeat the terrorists". The ad also features an old lady fraily saying, "we've already had one 9/11, we don't need another one!"

Wow! A multi-million dollar nation-wide radio/ newspaper ad campaign whose only stated intent is to keep the war going? Hmmm. So, faster than you can say "military industrial complex", I was on a computer trying to figure out the angle on these guys. "Oh cool" I thought gleefully, "I'll be the first to expose these bastards!"

So much for that. Lot's of people beat me to it, obviously.

But it's actually a little less glamorous than the senario I was envisioning, with layers and layers of front groups covertly funnelling money from the likes of Haliburton and Lockheed Martin to finance all this propaganda by Freedom's Watch. No, no! Why so much sneaking around when nobody will even care except a bunch of liberal politicos, and they're already a lost cause?

No, the funding is right up front, and it reads like a list of who's who of American Mega-Industrialists, and Bush fundraisers. Surprise, surprise.

Freedom's Watch masquerades as some kind of grass-roots organization, calling themselves a "group of Americans who are concerned about freedom." But again, this is Bush's inner circle, exclusively.

This is remniscent of Bush's fake newscasts from a few years back, wherein, the administration produced fake taxpayer-funded newscasts on several issues he was trying to promote at the time.

Fake Grassroots movements? Fake news media? Dude, where's my country?