I’ve been thinking about political use of the term, spin:
"In public relations, spin is a usually pejorative term signifying a heavily biased portrayal in one’s own favor of an event or situation. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, spin often, though not always, implies disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics. Politicians are often accused of spin by their political opponents."
I kind of think spin and "politics" go hand in hand. The metaphor comes from sports, where adding rotation to a ball makes it curve in the favor of the pitcher. But it’s still a baseball. I think of spin in politics as presenting things in the best light, not as outright lies.
What the Bush Administration has done doesn’t seem like spin to me. They use spin in their damage control, when their primary tools fail. Their primary tools are much more devious than spin.
- The War in Iraq: They wanted to go to war with Iraq, and decided that the best way to justify it was to claim Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They set up the OSP to locate some evidence for WMD’s, and the WHIG to sell the idea. They found some shaky stuff, the Niger Documents and Aluminum Tubes for rockets, and off we went to war. That’s not spin. There was nothing there to spin. Was their claim of faulty intelligence spin? Since the same groups that made up the intelligence was now claiming to be duped by it, it’s more than that to me. The whole story isn’t the usual "white lies" that we call spin. It’s the dark kind, the kind we call just plain "lies."
- N.S.A. Unwarranted Domestic Spying: No spin there. They just didn’t tell us. They were directed by Congress not to do it and they did it. That isn’t spin.
- Signing Documents: When given legislation that they don’t like, they file a document that says that they’re not going to do it. But that document isn’t publicized. Is that spin? I don’t think so. I call it "deceit."
And so on and so on. My point? Even the term spin is a lie. We’re used to such things, so they allow us, even help us, to call it spin.
Spin is not a synonym for "lies" and "deceit."
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