“Wag the dog” This is the name of the game. We saw it in the 1998 movie of the same title, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro and directed by Barry Levinson. In the movie, a US president is accused of seducing a minor in the anteroom of the Oval Office. A presidential election is weeks away, and the opposition candidate exploits the scandal in his TV campaign. The White House hires a spin doctor to do “damage control,” and his advice is to manufacture a phony international crisis with a foreign government. Which one? Albania. “Why Albania?” the White House aide asks. “Why not?” the spin doctor answers. Nobody knows where it is, nobody cares, and you can’t get any news out of it. In Aquino’s case, China has taken the place of Albania. And the Times provided the platform. Anti-GMA tack no longer working He needed a new “enemy figure” to boost his “rating.” His predecessor Gloria Macapagal Arroyo used to fulfill that role; by jailing her on a non-bailable offense, even without her having been convicted for it, Aquino appeared to be doing his work even without doing anything at all. But she fell ill under medical detention, and became the subject of so much public sympathy from bishops, priests and plain citizens. Now more and more people are asking: Is Aquino not the more corrupt, the more hypocritical, the more heartless, the more cruel? Why has he not curbed rampant smuggling, illegal gambling, narcotics trade, human trafficking, money laundering? And why has he not fixed the world’s highest electricity rates that are killing the people? Why has he not done anything about the serious lack of jobs, of homes, of hospital beds, of basic support to farmers and fisherfolk, of public infrastructure? So enter China. By attacking China, Aquino tried to show all and sundry that he is ready to defend the last piece of rock in the West Philippine sea from any intruder, that he is ready to fight China to the last Filipino or to our last foreign ally. This brinkmanship is priceless to the propaganda fraudsters. They could thus run a survey where nine of the ten questions would be on “fighting China” and only one on poverty, corruption or governance, and thereby arrange a satisfactory “rating” for the demagogue in Malacañang. It is an old trick, but it seems to work all the time. When a government faces a seemingly intractable problem, it creates a diversion. Thus an entirely dangerous and “unsolvable” crisis is overtaken and superseded by a lesser one, and the problem disappears.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 02:14:50 +0000
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