RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Narrative Can Never Be Wrong: The Political Elite Is Willing To Lose Its Pants To Save Its Face.

Yet having coated his remarks with that syntactic sugar, Obama gets down to a very grim business. And what a contrast it is. He ticks off a program at cruel variance with the outward message. What we need to do to stay alive, he says, is control guns, clamp down on social media, review the visa-waiver program. The fine print of the speech is such a negation of the soaring rhetoric that it might as well be from another speech.

A moment’s consideration of the speech makes it apparent that “the only thing to fear is not fear itself.” The main thing to fear is falsification. The administration is deathly afraid of admitting it got it wrong from the beginning. Or worse yet, admitting where it was going all along. That would ruin its aura of benevolent omniscience. Hope and Change in conflict with Islamism can neither be explained nor managed within the framework of the Narrative. The result is two messages in the speech: the pablum of the Narrative overlaid with the creeping fascism of the details.

Yep.