Wag the Dog Again (and Again)

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

For movie buffs the political drama from 1997 “Wag the dog” is a familiar (popular) movie, which was a production that was made to protect the president from scandal  who was about to face reelection.  It was fantastic cinema which depicted the fabrication of news and how to keep the media from learning about the real scandal and reality.  I really enjoyed the movie (and watched it a couple times after) for the political manipulation and the drama of diversion from real scandal.

For history and political buffs, the early eighties and Nixon and Watergate will continue to be political and personal challenges at the highest level in the US presidency.  There is so much written an depicted about Watergate we will for generations to come will ponder about the mindset of someone who is already powerful and why would they think of anything illegal.  Before any pondering of the powerful mind, it might simply be the insecurities of human beings, and/or thinking that a person in power can be above the law.  Either case, as history recorded the before and aftermath of Watergate, the truth is always going to prevail.  Some twenty years after the movie Wag the Dog (1997) was released, we in 2017 are in Trump presidency.

In less than a few days of Trump in white house, the phrase “alternate facts” was coined by his team.  What else did the public expect than wagging the dog, daily?

Trump is 70 years old, and it is impossible to think that he will get religion at this age.  It is not possible.  He has never been gentle, polite or truthful.  Until he was elected president Trump made up stories on everything he could think of, and peddled them until he was forced to stop spreading them.  Whatever the reason enough of us in the USA voted for him to lead our nation, and thus the reality TV from Washington is now on 24/7/365.

On Friday March 3, 2017, my little girl got off the school bus at 1 41 PM.  It is my normal routine to walk over to the bus stop and walk back to together.  We live less than a block from her bus stop, but that little walk allows me to ask her about school and obviously about her grades, on a daily basis.  On Friday she said there were two kids fighting with each other on the bus and the bus got delayed by a couple of minutes.  As usual I ask her, why?  These kids are somewhere between 8 and 12, and why would they fight in such a short trip from school to home?

The next couple minutes framed my weekly column.  One kid was spreading rumors about another kid, and that’s why they got into a fight and the bus got delayed by a couple of minutes.  These are ten year olds, hardly travel a couple of miles from school, and what could they be rumoring about?  I wondered several times, and my little one said she did not know.  All she knew was that there was a rumor and then the fight.  Nothing about what the rumor was about.  By the time we got home we moved on with our regular stuff and nothing about the rumor and fight.

When I woke up Saturday morning the news was all over Trump tweeting about Obama wire tapping his tower in New York.  He tweets (multiple tweets) that in 2916 election Obama ordered the wire taps on his tower, and he accused Obama on everything under the sun.  What was a contentious election in 2016, which he won, was mainly by him accusing and berating everyone I the world.  Now he is the president and he doesn’t need any help with intelligence, as the USA has the best intelligence teams in the world.

Ii haven’t thought too much about what he is tweeting.  I stopped watching the news and avoid the political coverage, but this was almost comical.  The movie Wag the Dog, and my little girl’s bus story on one kid spreading rumor on the other.

Whatever that followed the tweets is really far from reality, it is reality television.  Just that the grown ups already have been seeing this on a daily basis and we might keep seeing it for another 4 more years.