THOSE OF age in 1997 may well still remember Wag the Dog.
For one, it starred Hollywood A-listers Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman.
More worth unforgetting though is its plot – a Washington DC spinmeister distracts the electorate from a sex scandal (shades of the Bill-Monica affair) a few days before the election by hiring a film producer to…well, produce a bogus war with Albania.
The movie did not birth the idiom “wag the dog,” having been in the American lexicon since the 1870s, originating from “the tail wagging the dog.” Nonetheless, it was the movie that really made it an operative word in politics and communications, spawning the meaning “to start a war or military operation to divert political attention away from yourself.”
General usage now has “wag the dog” meaning to create a situation to divert the people’s attention from what is otherwise of greater significance, concern or interest to them.
Wag the dog. That is precisely what I saw in the acoustics shootout at the Senate last night. No, I have absolutely no pretensions to expertise in forensics, at best being an armchair generalist. Still, the tell-tale signs are all there.
Doggone it.
(AP Photo)
