Bad News is Good News

Carpetbagger’s got a good piece on foreign policy expert Lawrence Korb and his opinion that the surge is not working. And one of the thing’s Carpetbagger mentions is the disconnect between the Bush Admin’s propaganda and what’s actually going on in Iraq. And that got me wondering whether the disconnect is entirely invented at the top.

Because I’m thinking that this fraud might very well be perpetrated much lower in the ranks. Sure, the ultimate blame lies with Bush, for being a simple-minded person who doesn’t want to be told bad news. But really, it’s quite likely that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of those a-holes really do believe that the media is lying to them, because they’ve set-up a system that will only tolerate positive news. So underlings are pressured to lie in the messages they send up the system; because no other message is tolerated and it's better for them to send good news. And so rather than the Bush Admin outright lying about success, perhaps they’re simply victims of their own authoritarianism and fear of failure. Not to imply moral equivalence, but I believe that was one of the downfalls of the Soviets, as well as Hitler.

And that’s why authoritarians will never succeed in the longrun. It’s not a bad way of gaining power, but it’s a lousy way of keeping it. Because you never find out that something's gone wrong until it's too late. Sometimes, bad news is the best news of all.