Third, when reality catches up with the narrative—Obamacare is going to cost trillions, and millions are losing their health insurance—call on the same echo chamber that lied in the first place to gaslight the critics, have them alternately insist everyone knew this was going to happen or that it’s a small price to pay for being on the right side of history, and, finally, have your fellow-travelers bask in achieving your political objective even though the trail of self-serving lies left behind seriously erodes the public trust necessary to govern in the future.
The minor problem with this approach is that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Perhaps the fallout over the Rhodes interview is best summed up by a headline in Foreign Policy from Thomas E. Ricks, the Pulitzer-winning reporter who covered the Iraq war for the Washington Post: “A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the a—hole who is the president’s foreign policy guru.” The substance of the article wasn’t much more restrained. Ricks compares Rhodes to “the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds?”
Read the whole thing.