Lest you think propaganda was invented by David Brock, consider what I was taught in elementary school. There, not necessarily promoted as an idea to be emulated, was the American Exceptionalism (AE). Beginning before the Revolution but encouraged by it, AE found its first political enactment of the Monroe Doctrine.

The justification of this keep out of OUR hemisphere was of course AE.

A country in which the news media puts more emphasis on the absence or not of a flag pin on a candidate’s lapel than they do on the veracity of his/her statements and the consistency of his/her policy votes, is one that deserves its fate.

The Powell memorandum told the Republicans to go forth and use ownership of media and industry by the super-rich to change American popular culture from top to bottom — in order to put a stop to the social and political ferment of the Sixties and Seventies, crush the so-called counterculture, and try to make any revival of such developments impossible once and for all.