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“Why you can’t believe what you see on video” and “why you can’t believe what your government tells you” and “how mainstream media news controls you“.  The following clips from the classic film “WAG THE DOG” demonstrate how “world events” and “the news” are fabricated to suit the agenda of the real life “MIB” = “Military Industrial Bankers”.  (The faked assassination of Bin Laden is the most recent example of this kind of theatrical production.) War is the #1 most profitable enterprise for bankers in the entire history of the human race.  Every war in history was financed by an enterprising banker who profited from the death, destruction and ruin of war.  I recommend that you add it to the top of your “must read” and “must see” lists, if you haven’t already.

Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a “grassroots” movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to another political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. The term is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.

Thanks to political ‘astroturfing’ and governmental spin-doctoring aided by video effects production, and the willingness to lie, cheat and kill for profits, real wars are no longer needed. The illusion of war can be more convenient and profitable to maintaining financial power that bullets and bombs and without the messy guts and blood to clean up.  Every aspiring CIA agent needs to brush up on script writing skills instead of spy tactics in the modern age of media spin.

Larry Beinhart is the author of “AMERICAN HERO“, which is the basis for the film “Wag The Dog“.

The title of the film comes from an idiomatic English-language expression “the tail wagging the dog”, which is commented at the beginning of the film by a caption that reads:

Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because the dog is smarter than the tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.

Synopsis:

“In a 29-day shoot, Barry Levinson filmed this $15 million political and media satire, adapted by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet from Larry Beinhart’s novel, American Hero. Two weeks prior to re-election, the President (Michael Belson) is accused of cornering an underage girl in the Oval Office. To keep the media from learning of this, Presidential adviser Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) brings in political consultant and spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro), a specialist in such salvage operations. Brean suggests fabricating denials of non-existent emergencies — such as denials about the B-3 bomber. The denial, of course, is true, since no B-3 bomber exists. Brean visits the mansion of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) and gives him the assignment to create a patriotic campaign centered around a war in Albania. Motss assembles a creative team — Liz Butsky (Andrea Martin), the trend-setter Fad King (Denis Leary), and songwriter Johnny Green (Willie Nelson). Treated like an ad campaign, the songs and symbols are transmitted directly from a Hollywood soundstage to CNN. The star of their campaign is a “rescued” pilot — in reality, a psychotic military prisoner (Woody Harrelson), who’s a ticking time bomb. The flag-waving song, “The American Dream” was written for the film by Tom Bahler (who co-wrote “We Are the World”). Beinhart’s original novel involved a real President (Bush), a real war (the Gulf War), and the premise that George Bush and Saddam Hussein staged it”. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi for Rotten Tomatoes

Excerpt of an interview with Larry Beinhart THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOK, “AMERICAN HERO”:

BuzzFlash: Your novel, American Hero, was the basis for the film, “Wag the Dog.” Your fiction is so interwoven with the reality of politics that, in many ways, it is reality, except that certain specifics are changed. Another of your books, Fog Facts, examined the deception that is used in political narratives to mislead the public.

Let’s look at two real stories that the government itself chose to play up — those of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. What was the Pentagon trying to do with those stories? Jessica Lynch was portrayed as a heroine. The Pentagon basically created something out of her that didn’t exist. She was far too modest to take claim for what they attributed to her. And then we’ve learned that Pat Tillman didn’t die heroically. The Pentagon covered up the circumstances of his death, which was death by friendly fire, and made a heroic narrative out of his death that was simply a lie. Jessica Lynch wasn’t a victim of friendly fire, but she was unconscious during virtually all of her ordeal, and they attributed heroic acts to her that didn’t happen.

Larry Beinhart: They were trying to create a fictional narrative that everybody would get behind and cheer. It’s something that armies have always done. For instance, the British Army would go off to the Sudan, and everybody but one guy would get slaughtered, and he would be marched back through London as a hero. It’s one of the things you do in war. You bring back the heroes, and you give them a parade. And you beat the drums, and you get people to join up.

I love Pat Tillman, because Pat Tillman should be the genuine poster boy for the Bush wars. Here’s a guy who signs up out of genuine heroism and wants to do something. He goes off and gets killed by friendly fire. That he gets killed by accident, or by the incompetence of his own people, is the perfect metaphor for any Bush effort about anything, be it their failure to rescue New Orleans or the failed war in Afghanistan, or the failed war in Iraq. Whatever these guys touch turns into “Death to Smoochy.” And then they produce a fictional narrative about it, and lie about it, because they want to keep their story going. When somebody tries to expose it, they say you’re not Christian enough. If you were Christian enough, you wouldn’t be upset that your son is dead. So Pat Tillman should be the poster boy for this war — no question about it.

BuzzFlash: If we go back to before the first Gulf War, one of the “gotcha” points in terms of the narrative that led to that war was that the Iraqis had taken over a hospital and thrown babies out of their incubators.

Larry Beinhart: Yes.

BuzzFlash: A young woman testified to Congress and said that she witnessed all this, and how horrifying it was that Iraqis were just barbarians. They made these babies die. Later it was revealed that this young woman was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and she wasn’t even in Kuwait — had no knowledge of such an event.

Larry Beinhart: Her story wasn’t true, right.

BuzzFlash: And she had been coached by a public relations firm and given a script to read to Congress. Clearly, this was not done without the knowledge of the Bush I Administration. That revealed how far our government — in this case, the Bush I Administration — would go. They actually fabricated an incident, with the help of a PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, and put a young woman who was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador before Congress. As a fiction writer, how can you outdo that?

Larry Beinhart: That’s essentially why I wrote American Hero, which came out in 1994. The essential thrust of the book is that the administration created a fictional narrative to justify the real war that they wanted to have. I wanted to produce a fictional narrative that you could read, and know it was fiction, and yet when you had done so, the story explains the facts better than the the government’s story.

But they sold the war. They have produced wars based on fictional narratives. I was astonished when “wag the dog” became a part of the international lexicon — it became a metaphor for fictionalized war.

That’s great, but the cynicism did not produce restraint. It produced even more outrageously cynical behavior. It’s really quite terrifying. As I wrote in my new introduction for Wag the Dog: The Novel, which is the title of the reissue of the book, it was if they had taken this as an instruction manual.

As part of Wag the Dog, I have a scene in which the guy who’s making up Gulf War I considers making up a war called the “war on terror.” And he’s going to have an incident. They’re going to create the war on terror. And in the war on terror, it’ll be like the Crusades — the Christian, rational West against the backward, primitive Islamic East. And it’ll be the new Crusades. And clearly you had a fictional incident.

And lo and behold, we had a real incident with 9/11. Then they went ahead and created the war on Iraq, and the war on terror — which was kind of like the Crusades — you know, the rational, Christian West against the mad, Islamo-fascist East.

It was astonishingly fictional, but it was a narrative. It was the only narrative seriously available. Because of that, our media universally joined up with it.”