Remember when the CIA spent six years putting together six thousand page report on the torture it conducted and then "lost" it right before it was to be delivered and then "found" it again once it was clear that they weren't going to get away with that lame excuse?
Use of the term dates back decades, and it's popularity accelerated through Bush the Younger's reign (for obvious reasons I think, Bush was widely perceived as an idiotic puppet, a theatrical figurehead for the real government (e.g. Cheney and co.))