Today, Jay Rosen over at Huffington Post uses a slightly different analysis to come to the same conclusion as moi last Saturday re what I’ll call here The McClellan Mushroom Strategy: Keep him in the dark and feed him loads of shit:
One of Bush’s strengths is his eye for human weakness. The towel-snapping humor is based on this. It was that eye that spotted in McClellan a White House spokesman who could be pushed further into propaganda use than prior press secretaries would have tolerated. In order to get someone that pliable, you have to give up a lot in experience, talent, charm, agility, depth. But for various reasons— which I will explain— Bush and Cheney saw these defects as an advantage. They actually wanted the executive branch to become more opaque, and he was the perfect man for that.
For my original post of the cognitive aspects of deception, click here.
