You Spin Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round.
This entry was posted on 4/14/2006 10:02 PM and is filed under General Musings.
I went to see "
Thank You For Smoking" this evening, and thought it was
a welcome laugh in an anxious week. The movie is about one certain Nick Naylor,
a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, who is a master of turning
objections around on critics, a scholar in the art of persuasion, the
so-dubbed "Sultan of Spin". While the film was a bit of a one-trick
pony, attempting to hold attention by carrying the single theme through
a number of satiric scenarios rather than show real character
development, I don't think it was meant to be more than a razor sharp
exposé of the spin we all get served up on a regular basis
(particularly of late under this administration). And the pony knew its
trick pretty well, so I was entertained and stimulated.
Nick Naylor quotes:
"My job requires a certain . . . moral flexibility."
"If you argue right, you
are right."
Donald Rumsfeld must have studied those lines, as he's been spinning like a sorority girl on her 6th margarita in recent news,
deflecting demands for his resignation by ex-generals with a pooh-pooh
and flick of his hand. Boy, does this guy have chutzpah, spinning this
utter failure and corruption into his very own (get out your violins)
"survivor" story:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told troops... that he is "a survivor" who knows
better than to take too seriously a score of calls from the press and
politicians for his resignation over prisoner-abuse charges.
"I've stopped reading the newspapers," he said to cheers and
applause from U.S. soldiers at the detention camp at the epicenter of
the scandal that has plagued the Pentagon in recent weeks. "It's a
fact. I'm a survivor."
He went on in
another interview
I heard on NPR today to say, "The fact that two or three or four retired people have
different views, I respect their views," Rumsfeld said. "But obviously
if, out of thousands and thousands of admirals
and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed
the secretary of defence of the United States, it would be like a
merry-go-round."
Yeah. Just like the fact that oh, one or two or 100,000,000 people
think this administration is an abysmal harbinger of doom, aint no big
thing. Pshaw. Merry go round? If that's how you want to spin it, Don.
