By the second year of the Clinton administration, it seemed something similar was occurring in the United States, in part, because the Reagan-Bush-41 administrations had left behind not only a capacity for "information warfare" in the Third World but a domestic version of that propaganda infrastructure.
Documentary evidence from Reagan's presidential library now shows that the overseas and domestic propaganda machines were built simultaneously as Reagan's CIA Director William Casey recruited conservative foundation executives like Richard Mellon Scaife to help finance these activities.
Casey also put a senior CIA propagandist, Walter Raymond Jr., into Reagan's National Security Council to create an inter-agency propaganda bureaucracy and to oversee its operation. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Reagan's Propaganda Succeeded."]
Another major accomplishment of the Reagan administration was the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, which on the surface was intended to finance pro-U.S. political/media entities around the globe.
But NED had another side. Since many of the NED-funded organizations were based in Washington and since the NED bureaucracy was dominated by neoconservatives NED, in effect, became a permanent funding mechanism for the neocon community in the U.S. capital.
Ironically, NED, which currently has a $100 million annual budget, may have done more to influence the course of the United States than any of the countries it has targeted for "democratization." NED funding explains why Washington's neocons have remained so influential despite their involvement in so many policy disasters, such as the Iraq War.
Even when the neocons find themselves adrift during brief periods out of power, many of them remain afloat with the help of NED grant money. They can hang onto a financial life-preserver tossed from some institute that benefits from the federal funding.
That way, the neocons can continue writing op-eds and books, while weighing in on TV talk shows and at conferences that shape U.S. government policies.
These political/media mechanisms dating back to the Reagan years may have been originally designed to protect the political flanks of a Republican administration, but it turned out they could be put to use just as effectively for offense as for defense.
When Clinton managed to wrest the White House from the Republicans after 12 years of Reagan and Bush-41, the GOP realized that it could well shorten its time out of power by savaging the new President and creating chaos to undermine his political power and his popularity.
Clinton-Hating
In February 1994, I attended the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and was stunned to see the array of Clinton-hating paraphernalia, including slick videos suggesting that Bill Clinton was a mass murderer and semi-nude photo-shopped images of Hillary Clinton. (Some of the anti-Clinton propaganda was being financed by the same right-wing foundations that had collaborated with Reagan and Casey.)
By early fall 1994, the anti-Clinton hysteria was sweeping the country, though Democrats were mostly oblivious to its ferocity. Shortly before the 1994 elections, I had dinner with a savvy Democratic operative at the Monocle restaurant on Capitol Hill and told him that it looked to me like the Democrats would lose both the House and the Senate.
He responded that I might be right about the Senate but that there was no way the House would fall to the Republicans. A few days later, however, that was exactly what happened.
While the Democrats were slow on the uptake, the Republicans definitely "got" what was happening and why. In celebration, the Gingrich "revolutionaries" made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of the new Republican congressional majority, hailing him as their "national precinct captain."
Though today's conventional wisdom holds that a big difference between 1994 and 2010 is that Gingrich had a positive message in his "Contract for America," that analysis misses the point that it was the tearing down of the Clintons represented by Limbaugh's daily tirades and the impression of national disarray under Clinton that were key to the GOP victory in 1994.
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