Not making this up

American public relations firms are going full throttle right now, with the take-no-prisoners battle for the Republican presidential nomination in full swing and the winner-take-all war between whoever emerges triumphant from the Republican ruins and Democratic U.S. President Barack Obama in the November election getting hot.

These are the glory days for these PR firms, the salad days when candidates and political parties pay out millions of dollars in the hope of being made to look better in the public eye than they actually are.

But what do these companies do between elections? When either Mitt Romney or, more probably, Newt Gingrich after being trounced in Florida this week, drops out of the Republican race, how will public relations people who represent him make up that financial shortfall?

Fortunately for America's PR firms, there are lots of African dictators around the world whose images need buffing and no shortage of professional American image-buffers willing to do the job.

A running theme in the comic strip Doonesbury in the last couple of years has the dictator of Bezerkistan, who has a weakness for massacring opponents, hiring the infamously sleazy Duke as his PR manager to improve his image in the U.S.

Sadly, this not a figment of the cartoonist's imagination. American public relations firms have represented the leaders of Rwanda, Equatorial Guinea and the former Tunisian dictator, three of Africa's most brutal regimes, among other monsters, and made millions doing it. That can't be a good thing. When reality takes its cue from comic strips, we are in trouble.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 3, 2012 A10