but couldn't find the mojo ratings at the NY Times.
Krugman: Ignorance isn't Strength
It's not anything groundbreaking for those of us who've been watching the Bush debacle, and definitely not new to Krugman fans, but it is a particulary concise and clear outline of how the administration treats reality and information.
For the neocon agenda to "work," blind adherence to ideology requires an ability to deny any objective view of reality in favor of the party line. You can call it Orwelllian, as does Krugman. You can invoke Huxley's Brave New World. But I think you need not even look to the fictions of literature to find nightmarish comparisons. It has been slightly more than a decade since the collapse of the eastern bloc. In that time, the very people who used the cold war to their advantage have adopted the techniques of information control so brutally effective in the former soviet states and adapted them to fit a free capitalist society. Every day there is more evidence of how they have used control of the media to simply lie and obfuscate when evidence points to failure.
One of the great features of capitalist democracy is its adaptability. More than any other administration, Bush and his cronies have shown us how that adaptability is also one of it's most frightening weak points.
We stand at a critical juncture in history. If we do not stem the tide of liars and greedy fearmongers in November, I fear that we will be unable to reverse the damage without greater catastrophe.