“Wonderland” Columnist Channels Dr. Sanity in His Advice to Bush

Daniel Henninger doesn’t know this, but in analyzing the president’s relative unpopularity despite objectively impressive success, he’s acknowledging the impact of the “Command Hallucinations” of the WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, know to most as The Mainstream Media) recognized by Dr. Sanity back in October.

First, Dr. Sanity (originally about the economy, but just as valid as it relates to the War in Iraq):

The American public is hearing voices. And like auditory hallucinations experienced by psychiatric patients, these voices whisper continual doom and gloom. They tell (Americans) that everything is bad bad bad.

These voices are persistant and continual. They are unrelenting. They are often frightening. And like the command hallucinations that torment many of my patients, they are completely and totally untrue. You are bad. Life isn’t worth living. They are trying to hurt you. Don’t try, it’s not worth it.

It is very rare for such voices to say anything at all positive. They have a specific goal–and that goal is the distortion of reality.

So why do patients believe them? Especially the one’s that are bizarre and so obviously out of touch with any known reality?

….. It is a triumph of false perceptions over reality. It is testimony to how profoundly and fundamentally people trust their perceptual faculties and let their peceptions rule, even when those perception come in conflict with common sense, truth, or reality.

We, the American people have come to have a similar trust in the voices of the MSM. Over the years, they have almost become an additional perceptual faculty that we rely on–simply because life has become too complicated and overwhelming, that the use of our ordinary senses is insufficient in the modern world.

In other words, we rely on the media in the same way we rely on our own senses to provide us with the information necessary to make decisions and judgements in the real world.

The MSM has become those evil voices inside our head.

Now here’s Henninger:

One of the great mysteries of public life has been the absence of an organized Bush effort to defend the war.

….. Running a 4.3% quarter in the face of Katrina is shout-from-the-rooftop news, but for this administration it’s just another tree falling in the forest.

This is the Alfred E. Neuman, “What, me worry?” school of public relations. It doesn’t seem quite appropriate for a major war.

I don’t think the Bushies are numb to seeing their public standing dissed and downgraded. I think they’ve concluded this is a game that’s rigged against them, something over which they have little control. Other presidencies–Nixon, Johnson–obsessed over their bad press. LBJ by legend watched the evening news about Vietnam simultaneously on three TVs, a ticket to neurosis and night sweats.

In contrast, the Bush media model has been to ignore the polls, skip the spin and govern for results. Mr. Bush’s bet is that history will judge Iraq a success; the odds now suggest he’s right. And if one believes in markets, as Mr. Bush largely does, sustained 4% growth is a better day’s work than, like his predecessor, trying to govern to the polls.

For this White House, the mainstream media’s spin is like bad weather–uncontrollable. The polls, like the bad-weather blahs, don’t matter. But clinical depression does matter and the polls now reflect clinical depression. Even the president’s conservative base can’t snap out of it. Consider the reality standing before a movement conservative: Sen. Joe Lieberman’s essay on this page earlier in the week argued compellingly that Iraq is much better than imagined. The economic growth numbers validate tax-cut theory, and they’re getting pinch-me-if-it’s-real justices in John Roberts and Sam Alito. And they’re depressed!

A visit to our editorial offices this week by about 40 conservative think-tank leaders revealed almost universal gloom and even distrust of the president–primarily over years of pig-out spending. Not one of them uttered the word “Iraq.”

When positive reality becomes irrelevant, you’ve got the blues. Or perhaps we have discovered a new form of brainwashing.

The Bush administration has underestimated the changed nature of modern media. The mainstream media alone is not the problem. All these political subjects–the war, immigration–get discussed at length, all the time, on talk shows and across the great expanses of the Web wilderness. In this new environment, the emotional content has become stronger and even more important than the facts, such as they are. The facts have been demoted. What’s more, the language, the very vocabulary of all these conversations, has been ramped way up. Shrillness has monetary value now, and it has political value. If this were traditional spin, as the White House assumes, it wouldn’t matter. But in our time the spin has become a vortex.

The leading exploiter of this phenomenon is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Despite the comparatively minimal numbers killed, his suicide bombers and car bombs have dispirited even normally clear-eyed supporters of the war effort and its purpose. Conservative columnists go from support for Iraq to advocating withdrawal and back to support depending on mood swings. Iraq has become simply “the violence.” But if “the violence” has displaced the rest of reality, then the Bush model of ignoring the spin isn’t viable. The result is John Murtha.

By not seeing that the spin is now a vortex, the White House let it suck down the president’s support to a level that threatens his ability to govern.

The Bush “let ‘em rant” strategy might work–10 years from now. Unfortunately, the influence of the WORMs is very powerful, especially on the 86% of the public who essentially get their news and information when they just happen to hear or see it. Until New Media becomes so pervasive that it routinely reaches that 86%, the WORMs will be a force that must be reckoned with, and aggressively.