The 1977 classic, Wag the Dog, was seen as a bit of wickedly fun lampoon at the time but, like the cult classic Idiocracy, both seem to get less funny and more prophetic with each passing year.
In Wag the Dog, the president played by Michael Belson, is caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office just weeks before the election. To hide his scandal, the White House hires a film maker to construct a fictional war in Albania, complete with theme song and fake film footage of a photogenic orphan. Motss even uses a mental patient who once served in the military because he has the right last name, Shoe, to portray a war hero.
In Idiocracy, a 2006 science fiction comedy, the plot follows Army Corporal Joe Bauers, played by Luke Wilson, selected as the most average individual in the military, who wakes up 500 years in the future after a botched government hibernation experiment to find himself in a dystopian society run by corporations, where evolution has made humanity stupid because people no longer had to be intelligent and physically fit to survive due to technology. Deemed the smartest man in the world, Bauers is eventually appointed to Secretary of the Interior.
If you haven’t seen these films, you have no idea what you’re missing.
One of the reasons corrupt governments love war so much is that it’s an all-access excuse to do the unthinkable. You can direct if abroad or focus it at home. You can fund and staff foreign battles or you can wage campaigns upon your own people and the potential to grab ever more power and misbehave more egregiously or act with less fiscal restraint presents itself all over from graft to grift to just plain degenerate profligacy.
Need a few zillion to fund defense contractors, cronies, corrupt regimes, and skim a bit for yourself? No problem, war is the way to go. Wanna crack down on your own peaceful people and literally make them turn to violent black markets that you can use to elicit ever more crackdowns? Use the war on drugs to take away rights and property while blaming the people for the rise of drug cartels to whom you’re granting oligopoly and price supports.
These forever wars for gain ratchet ever upward in their budgets as the war on terror, poverty, racism, fantastical “phobias,” claims of privilege and whomsoever last upset the neocons or the classic backbone of globalist warlords democrats. Half of this charade is making sure you feel constantly attacked so you’ll allow the war-makers to invoke some form of war powers.
This is pointless, fruitless and dishonest but it’s also distracting and worth keeping in mind just how good wars are at diverting attention from other matters. They let the federales blow massive budget holes and permanent rights with that most mismonikered legislative atrocity “The Patriot Act” or the ESG that winds up being tailored tyranny of Evangelical Socialist Grifters.
It’s a tried and true jingo jamboree to shut off critical thinking and criticism, a practice so obvious and blatant that satire about hiring film makes to make up wars to cover scandals and influence the outcome of elections was once amusing.
“Look at that! That is a complete f**king fraud and it looks a hundred percent real. It’s the best work I’ve ever done in my life, because it’s so honest.” Stanley Motss, Wag the Dog (and probably half of DC on any given Wednesday, 2023)
Source: Reclaim the Elites’ Frame by El Gato Malo, Brownstone Institute
