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John Brown aggregates all the most recent public diplomacy related news, including current issues in U.S. foreign policy, international broadcasting and media, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, educational exchanges, anti-Americanism, and the reception of American popular culture abroad.

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY PRESS AND BLOG REVIEW, JANUARY 14-15, 2008
by John H. Brown

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY PRESS AND BLOG REVIEW, JANUARY 14-15 “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways.” —National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell; cited in Dan Froomkin, “The McConnell Interview,” in “Bush Chooses What to Believe” (washingtonpost.com, January 14) LINK “Whoever in the case of a European war was not with me was against me.” —Kaiser William II, informing Chancellor von Bülow what he had told Belgian King Leopold II in 1904; cited in Barbara W. Tuchman, “The Guns of August” (Tess Press reprint), p. 29 EXHIBITS a) Re “Symbols of Power: Napoleon and the Art of Empire Style: 1800-1815,” on display until January 27, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: “Long before the emergence of radio, television, or the Internet [propaganda] ... flowered during the reign of a man who commanded the largest army Europe had ever seen, but who insisted that ‘Imagination rules the world,’ not the rifle or the cannon.” —Jacqueline Houton,“Symbols Of Power@MFA” (Big Red and Shiny, January 14) LINK b) “Artists Against the War,” forthcoming at the Society of Illustrators in NYC, sixty pieces by sixty artists offering a vast range of observation, thought, and feeling. LINK VIDEOS a) Olbermann accuses U.S of trying to FAKE new Gulf of Tonkin LINK b) Iranian Navy Propaganda Long Version Borat Lives!! LINK POLITICAL CARTOON Hillary Faces the Bad Guys LINK A) PUBLIC DIPLOMACY (1-14) 1. Press Gaggle by National Security Advisor Steve Hadley Aboard Air Force One En Route Saudi Arabia – (Office of the Press Secretary. White House, January 14): Q Just one last thing—why did the President decide now in his last moments of his presidency to come do this kind of cultural outreach, public diplomacy thing in the UAE and Bahrain? Why was that important now? I mean, so much, so many cultural stops and he never usually does these kinds of things. MR. HADLEY: We’ve been doing cultural stops really for a while. If you look at the trip that we made in Latin America here a year, year-plus ago, it’s very much of a piece. One of the things we try to do is we figure out what are the objectives for the trip; what are the themes he wants to strike, both with the leaders and then publicly? And then in addition to the sort of formal governmental advance, we ask ourselves, what are the events that he can do that would both advance those objectives, both in terms of his own knowledge and understanding, but also can be visible of examples of his advancing that agenda, both for the country and in the region as a whole? That’s what we did in Latin America. That’s what we’ve done here. We did—tried to do the same thing on the trip to Australia, though that was considerably abbreviated. So I don’t think that’s particularly new. We’ve done it before. It’s a good part of getting him to see and be seen in the region. LINK 2. Illusions of the people who love to…... FULL TEXT
 
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