MENTAL RECESSION

McCain advisor and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm was much quoted in the press last week when he called us a nation of whiners and said we are in a "mental recession".

Despite the ridicule heaped on Gramm by most of the press, and despite John McCain's distancing himself from Gramm's remarks, some political commentators quietly admit that Gramm is right. He simply chose an unfortunate way of expressing the facts.

It has not gone unnoticed that, in an obvious attempt to gin up a recession during this election year, the media has made an heroic effort to persuade the American public that the economy is in the toilet. They quietly ignore good economic news while headlining anything that can be misinterpreted as "evidence" of a recession.

Take, for example, the housing market. A couple of weeks ago, one of the major networks breathlessly reported on that "new home sales plunged one percent last month!" Since when is a one percent drop referred to as a "plunge"? Since the media decided the Democrat Party needs a recession in order to win in November.

Although economic indicators are not consistent with recession, only a slowdown of the economic boom we've lately enjoyed, we hear a constant drumbeat of "recession" in the daily news.

Because of this constant hammering by the media and the phraseology journalists have deliberately chosen to use, the American public is being brainwashed into thinking the economy is in recession.

As a result, the public has reacted precisely the way the media calculated they would: by becoming more careful with their spending, thus contributing to the slowdown.

For months, public opinion polls have shown that most Americans believed we were in a recession, even though their personal financial status remained unchanged. They had obviously bought into the media hype.

The media and the Democrat Party with whom most of the media are aligned learned an important lesson long ago. If you repeat any lie often enough and loudly enough, you can brainwash the public into accepting it as fact.
An excellent example of this tactic is the media's successful campaign to convince the American public that there were never any WMDs in Iraq, despite mounds of solid evidence to the contrary.

As early as the 1980's, Saddam Hussein used mustard gas and nerve gas on the Kurdish population in his own country. This is well documented by the United Nations. In fact, one of the conditions of the truce which ended the 1991 Gulf War was the destruction of Hussein's stockpiles of those chemicals and the dismantling of the facilities used to produce them. Despite repeated warnings, Hussein did not comply. And yet today, because of valiant efforts by the press and the Democrat Party, the American public is convinced those chemicals never existed. They have been brainwashed into believing a fairy tale.

The media have performed the same feat of brainwashing with regard to the economy in this election year. And so, despite economic indicators to the contrary, they have managed to persuade the public to believe in their ginned-up, imaginary recession.

There is, indeed, a recession—a psychological recession, as former Senator Gramm pointed out.

And, true to form, upon having been discovered at their game, the press is howling furiously in protest.

© 2008 by Libbi Adams. All rights reserved.