Advertising, Politics, and Hypocrisy

I don't watch much TV, and most news programs make me apoplectic, so I missed this segment with Bill Clinton and Anderson Cooper. [just picked it up off DailyKos] Watch it.

Clinton's point about the spots the GOP ran in Georgia is dead on. One of the tricks of manipulating the medium that the GOP message machine has been so successful at has been to create such a wall of rhetorical white noise that no one in the news media seems to remember the GOP's awful, awful manipulations of the truth over the last twenty years. From Willie Horton to the blue dress to the Swift Boat vets and beyond in even more pervasive ways, they have succeeded in shredding our sociopolitical filters for what is reasonable, true, and rational.

And no matter what anyone thinks of Clinton, he deserves to speak out against this kind of message manipulation. After all, he spent eight years as victim of it.