Psychology is a discipline meant to help us understand how people think, behave, act, and react to all the various situations that can occur in life. And
there are a lot of different issues here. just to get to the nut of it, though, there s been a lot of scrutiny over barack obama and bill clinton. we just went back in first read, nbc news did, and took a look at some of the numbers of stories that had been written about barack obama and about bill clinton. we found 165 combined new york times and washington post stories about obama and jeremiah wright, for instance, once he announced his candidacy in 2007. an additional 41 stories about barack obama and chicago radical bill ayers. if you go back to bill clinton, there were 69 combined new york times and washington post stories all about jennifer flowers during the 1992 campaign, a lot more about the draft, the letter he had written as a college student to colonel holmes. so isn t this par for the course, what happens when you become a front-running democratic or republican
ordered to really butter up and manipulate visiting persons such as senator john mccain from the senate appropriations committee, such as diplomats that might be coming in, jack reed, al franken, karl levin, joe lieberman. very prominent people in the military business and the idea was to collect information on them and find pressure points or as the chief of staff or the general reportedly told colonel holmes, get inside their head, find the pressure points. and the idea was to get more money and more troops for the war. and it sounded as though my first reaction was oh, isn t that what they always do? eric: and in the article in the reports about this general caldwell, his spokesman said
afghanistan was encouraging to go on facebook and twitter, basically making no distinction between foreign audiences and domestic audiences. that s why with colonel holmes story, i think we sort of see a it s a window into this larger, and to me much more troubling trend of the tens of millions of dollars being spent to influence american public opinion and using people with the wrong skill sets to do so. a lot more happening in wisconsin. police are sent to several democratic lawmakers homes. isha joins was that and more ahead.
show you some sort of a village, as reporters you find yourself in these dog and pony shows and think wait a minute, this isn t real. what is different about this? it s certainly part of the same larger picture. but the issue is the resource or the weapon the military is employing to do that. when we re out there, we re with public affairs and we know their job is to spin us and put the best face on things. this is a great question, right? if you found out your team showing you around had just had completed a 40-hour course in psychological operations and was trained in psy-ops, you start to question is that an appropriate use of that resource? colonel holmes team cost approximately $6 million a year there. so is that an appropriate use of