It Was Nazi Joseph Goebbels Who Proved the Value of a Repeated Lie
Bush's Disastrous Dollar Policy
By Dan Froomkin Special to washingtonpost.com Thursday, November 8, 2007; 1:32 PM
President Bush doesn't talk about the dollar much, but when he does, he's got exactly one thing to say about it: "We have a strong dollar policy."
It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that Bush's "strong dollar policy" is driving the greenback into the ground.
The dollar is hitting record lows this week amidst fears that the mortgage-market meltdown will spread to other parts of the economy and as the Chinese make noise about moving more of their investments into euros. But it is the underlying dynamics of the American economy -- continued massive trade deficits and a whopping national debt -- that have put the dollar in such a precarious position.
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It's not popular to compare this administration to Nazi Germany, not considered patriotic. And yet the continued Bush mantra "We have a strong dollar policy" in the face of a dollar that has lost half its value under GWB smacks of nothing so much as Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, who said;
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
In interviews with the Wall Street Journal, CNN and others, Mr. Bush repeats the lie. We are about to reap the disaster of failed monetary policy, but probably not until this president has left office, when he will blame others. The WSJ and CNN performances remind of another Goebbels quote;
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."