{"id":753,"date":"2003-10-17T11:03:59","date_gmt":"2003-10-17T15:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=753"},"modified":"2003-10-17T11:03:59","modified_gmt":"2003-10-17T15:03:59","slug":"perish-the-thought-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=753","title":{"rendered":"Perish the Thought (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"One difference between PR and news is that in PR you try to put the big lie at the beginning o fthe piece, and in news, you put it at the end. A very fine example of this technique came in this morning’s Daily Telegraph<\/em> report<\/a> on US Lt General Willaim Boykin, who is in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
“Gen Boykin has repeatedly told Christian groups and prayer meetings that President George W Bush was chosen by God to lead the global fight against Satan.\nHe told one gathering: ‘Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.’
\nIn January, he told Baptists in Florida about a victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia, who had boasted that Allah would protect him from American capture. ‘I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol,’ Gen Boykin said.
\nHe also emerged from the conflict with a photograph of the Somalian capital Mogadishu bearing a strange dark mark. He has said this showed ‘the principalities of darkness. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy’.”<\/blockquote>Several paragraphs of balancing flannel follow; then comes the kicker at the end.
“Gen Boykin told NBC <\/span>that he would be curtailing his speeches to religious groups. ‘I don’t want to come across as a Right-wing radical,’ he said.”<\/blockquote>Let’s just terminate that thought with extreme prejudice, then. No. That’s wrong. Let’s terminate it with extreme moderation.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One difference between PR and news is that in PR you try to put the big lie at the beginning o fthe piece, and in news, you put it at the end. A very fine example of this technique came … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}