or how you hoodwink and bamboozle the stupid, bellicose, and bored to support unprincipled and unsupportable political agendas like the phenomenally wasteful and unsuccessful occupation of Iraq. After you've tricked the rubes, you can depend upon the inertia of their hubris to prevent these victims of the grand hornswaggle from recanting their earlier blunders...., matter of fact, they'll prolifically concoct post hoc rationalizations to account for their earlier hysterical suggestibility.
It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"