Have Bush and the Neocons Ruined it for the Israelis?

The Israeli propaganda blitz around their attack on Gaza has been greeted with uncharacteristic skepticism by the American public and even by some of the mainstream US press. Even the Jewish American community is uneasy about this one, in a way perhaps unparalelled since the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon and siege of Beirut. Jews for Peace in Los Angeles are actively protesting the Gaza atrocities, and newspaper articles from around the US on local protests held this weekend often mention mixed Arab-American and Jewish-American rallies.

If it is true that Americans are greeting Israeli talking points with more criticism this time, is it because we have been intensively exposed for the past 8 years to precisely this sort of mental manipulation by Bush-Cheney and their stable of Neoconservatives?

Let's take some of the basic techniques of propaganda practiced by Bush and compare them to those deployed by the Israeli leadership in the past 8 days.

1. Deny it all.

Bushie Examples: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied that there was massive looting in Iraq during April of 2003, alleging that CNN had one tape of a guy stealing a vase and kept looping it over and over again. "How many vases can they have?" he asked. In mid-summer 2003, Rumsfeld denied that there was a guerrilla war in Iraq, even though Jamie McIntyre of CNN was able to quote the Pentagon definition of guerrilla war, and it fit Iraq. Rumsfeld just replied, "No." More