Selling The Surge....

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Looks like one of British Columbia's favorite bigtime lobbyists from Bushworld, a man named Ed Gillespie who took $3.6 million dollars of local lumber company money to help push us through the trapdoor labelled "Anschluss, Softwood" got started early working on the Sept 11th roll out of the Doubly-Fudged SurgeSupreme Sundae Surprise:

From the WaPo:

.....Another new arrival in the West Wing set up a rapid-response PR unit hard-wired into Petraeus's shop. Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.

From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and last week, the office put out 94 such documents in various categories -- "Myths/Facts" or "Setting the Record Straight" to take issue with negative news articles, and "In Case You Missed It" to distribute positive articles or speeches.

Gillespie arranged several presidential speeches to make strategic arguments, such as comparing Iraq to Vietnam or warning of Iranian interference. When critics assailed Bush for overstating ties between al-Qaeda and the group called al-Qaeda in Iraq, Gillespie organized a Bush speech to make his case.

You've got to love that part about being 'hard wired into Patreaus' shop', especially when one of the biggest issues of the last couple of days has been whether there was any White House 'interference' in the writing of his report.

Patraeus has consistently responded that only he and 'his inner circle' wrote the report.

Which leaves one wondering just what the radius of that circle has to be to prevent one from being sprayed, day-after-day, with the turd spewing forth from all the blossoms standing within it.

Oh, and one more thing....

It looks like they're back at that 'making their own reality' thing again:

"The whole idea is to take these things on before they become conventional wisdom," said White House communications director Kevin Sullivan. "We have a very short window."


Sheesh.

I just may have to revise my stand that "all prop is bad prop" once again.

Because it's looking more and more like Billmon was right - it may be impossible to fight a total PR-Prop offensive with truth alone when the Media are being manipulated to build the massive spring-loaded arm of the catapault.



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